Leslie Contreras Schwartz
Leslie Contreras Schwartz is the fourth Houston Poet Laureate. She is the author of three collections of poetry: black dove / paloma negra (FlowerSong Press, 2020), Fuego (St. Julian Press, 2016), and Nightbloom & Cenote (SJP, 2018), a semi-finalist for the 2017 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, judged by Ilya Kaminsky. She currently teaches at The Alma College Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, a new low-residency graduate program in Alma, Michigan.
Her work, including essays and short stories, has appeared in Pleiades, The Missouri Review, [PANK], Iowa Review, Verse Daily, Catapult, and Xicanx: 21 Mexican American Writers of the 21st Century (University of Arizona, 2022), edited by ire’ne lara silva, among others. 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 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. Contreras Schwartz is also a member of the Macondo Writers’ Collective. She has taught at University of Houston and Rice University, teaches community workshops, and is a speaker on the topics of mental health and poetry.
Learn more at www.lesliecschwartz.com.
In stunningly varied forms and voices, BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA, examines the individual versus public bodies and documents narratives of those usually silenced, including people with mental illness, sex workers, women who are trafficked, and children in custody.
“When she began researching sex trafficking several years ago, Houston Poet Laureate Schwartz (Fuego) suddenly came face to face with the long-suppressed anguish of an abusive high school relationship. What resulted is this arresting study of individuals, from the sex trafficked to the mentally ill, who dissociate from their selves to avoid trauma. The first poem lands with a wallop, as nightmarish, bunkered horses embody her past pain ("These are my animals. If I destroy them, I destroy myself"), while the following poems, real and raw, detail the experience of splintering ("sacred self fractured self part times part to choir self// …loud architecture// …uproar, racket, orchestra harmonic// …golden trapped space of your own body." VERDICT Appropriately, syntax sometimes fractures here along with the self, intensifying an experience Schwartz captures in vervy writing.”—LIBRARY JOURNAL
Black Dove/Paloma Negra was a finalist for the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters.