Raina J. León

Raina J. León is a Black and Afro-Boricua poet and educator. Originally from Philadelphia, she holds an MFA in poetry from Saint Mary’s College of California and a PhD in education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

León’s first collection of poetry, Canticle of Idols (CW Books, 2008), was a finalist for both the Cave Canem First Book Poetry Prize and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She is also the author of sombra : (dis)locate (Salmon Poetry, 2016) and Boogeyman Dawn (Salmon Poetry, 2013), a finalist for the Naomi Long Madgett Prize.

A member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo, and The Writers Grotto and The Ruby, both in San Francisco, León has received fellowships and residencies from numerous arts institutions, including the Obsidian Foundation, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre.

A founding editor of The Acentos Review, León is a professor of creative writing at the University of Southern Maine and lives in Philadelphia, on Lenni Lenape ancestral lands.