The Schachtel Library and Congregation Beth Israel's Social Justice Committee are pleased to welcome Leslie Contreras Schwartz to read her works of poetry on Wednesday, February 21 at 7 PM. Leslie will be accompanied by fellow poet Joshua Gottlieb-Miller.

ABOUT LESLIE CONTRERAS SCHWARTZ

Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a multi-genre writer, a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, the 2019-2021 Houston Poet Laureate, and the author of the 2022 C&R Press Nonfiction Prize Winner From the Womb of Sky and Earth, a lyrical memoir.

She is also the author of five collections of poetry, Black Dove / Paloma Negra (FlowerSong Press, 2020), a finalist for 2020 Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters; Fuego (St. Julian Press, 2016); and Nightbloom & Cenote (SJP, 2018), a semi-finalist for the 2017 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, judged by Ilya Kaminsky.

Her work has appeared in AGNI, EPOCH, Missouri Review, Iowa Review, [PANK], Verse Daily, Pleiades, Zocalo Public Square, Gulf Coast, and Houston Noir (Akashic Books, 2019), and 2019 The Best Small Fiction anthology. Recent work has been featured with the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day. She has collaborated or been commissioned for poetic projects with the City of Houston, the Houston Grand Opera, and The Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University.

Contreras Schwartz is currently a poetry and nonfiction faculty member at Alma College's MFA low-residency program in creative writing, and a lecturer in creative writing at Rice University. Contreras Schwartz is a Jewish writer, who was born in Houston, Texas, with Mexican American and Mexican roots going back several generations in Houston and Texas. She is a graduate of The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and earned a bachelor's at Rice University.

Learn more at www.lesliecschwartz.com.

ABOUT JOSHUA GOTTLIEB-MILLER

Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is the author of The Art of Bagging (2023), which won Conduit’s Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize. His poetry, essays, scholarship, hybrid, and multimedia writing has also been published in Brooklyn Rail, Image, Poet Lore, Pleiades, and Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology, among other venues, and previously he served as Digital Nonfiction Editor and Poetry Editor at Gulf Coast. He has been awarded support from the University of Houston, Yiddish Book Center, MacDowell Colony, Yetzirah, and elsewhere. His second book, Dybbuk Americana, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press.