Leslie Contreras Schwartz is the author of four poetry collections, including Black Dove / Paloma Negra (FlowerSong Press, 2020), a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters’s Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, AGNI, The Iowa Review, Verse Daily, Pleiades, and elsewhere. A 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and the 2019–2021 poet laureate of Houston, she is on faculty at Alma College’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing. (updated 4/2022)