Leslie Contreras Schwartz is an essayist and poet, whose work has recently appeared in Catapult, The Texas Review, and Tinderbox, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and finalist for the 2018 Joy Harjo Poetry Competition for Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts. Her new collection of poems, Nightbloom & Cenote (St. Julian Press, May 2018), was a semi-finalist for the 2017 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, judged by Ilya Kaminsky.

She is the author of Fuego, and was a finalist for the 2018 Houston Poet Laureate. Her fiction will be included in the Houston Noir anthology, edited by Gwendolyn Zepeda (Akashic Press, 2019). She is currently an Interviews Editor at American Microreviews and Interviews, and works as a writing instructor and manuscript consultant for Writespace.