Raina León

Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Southwest Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo, The Sanctuary, and The Watering Hole. She is the author of black god mother this body, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work. She has received fellowships and residencies and attended retreats with the Obsidian Foundation, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts, which has published over 1000 Latinx voices since 2008. She is a recipient of a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Grant, a Leeway Transformation Grant recipient, and a Letras Boricuas fellow. She is professor emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve full professor rank there. She teaches poets and writers at the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine. She co-founded and co-founded the Wild Indigo Poetry Reading Series and co-founded StoryJoy, Inc, which produces the Fayette County African American History and Cultural Center, the Generational Archives podcast, and the Esperimento Sul Respiro residency program for creatives, healers, educators, and activists. She is a digital archivist, emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer.  She currently is at work on Swing Mezzo, a choreopoem on the life of Doris Rheubottom, the first Queen of Swing; the project is supported by theVelocity Fund, administered by Asian Arts Initiative, with generous funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.