Leslie Contreras Schwartz's first book, Fuego, was published by Saint Julian Press in 2016, which Inprint Houston's Rich Levy named one of the best books in 2016 by a Houston author. Her writing has recently appeared in Catapult, The Texas Review, and Tinderbox, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was named a finalist for the 2018 Joy Harjo Poetry Contest for Cutthroat: A Journal ofthe Arts. Schwartz was selected as a finalist for the 2018 Houston Poet Laureate and was recently a semi-finalist for the 2017 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, judged by Ilya Kaminsky. Schwartz earned an MFA in poetry from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in 2011 and graduated from Rice University in 2002. She teaches writing in Houston where she lives with her family.

Other poems by Leslie Contreras Schwartz in Verse Daily:
August 24, 2016:   "The Swim to Antarctica" "Before the swim, in twenty-two degree waters..."

Books by Leslie Contreras Schwartz:

Other poems on the web by Leslie Contreras Schwartz:
"Labor Pantoum"
"Postpartum"
"Lullaby for My Son After the Orlando Massacre"
"Cosmology"

Leslie Contreras Schwartz's Website.

Leslie Contreras Schwartz on Twitter.

About Nightbloom & Cenote:

"Nightbloom & Cenote sifts into the dirt beneath the cracks of girlhood, uncovers a retribution of generations, of family and of birth and misfortune of daughters unloved and unprotected, from the ever-unfolding story of patriarchy and its brutality, and sings of survival in the midst of all that violence. Sinuous as vines and gleaming as night-blooms, these poems tangle and snake and take the generational blame, the guilt reserved for us girls who grow into women, and finally break the cycle, finally crack the sidewalks we girls/women have been buried under all these years. Schwartz, with her lyrical prowess, sings us to safety: 'we will run out / this run belongs to us / both out that door with the baby and all her future babies and we will find all your sisters / my mother and hers.' These poems are steeped in culture and myth, are lush with the landscape of survival, are the voices of mothers and our mothering forebears who braid our hair and hold us as we weep, who teach us how, once our tears are dry, to fight back."
—Jennifer Givhan

"In Nightbloom & Cenote Leslie Contreras Schwartz traverses a nighttime landscape with eyes purposefully wide open. She descends into 'nightcups of hurt and stains'—navigates rugged territory—where most would refuse to tread. In these darkened depths, Schwartz pushes against every uncomfortable edge: personal and generational affronts. She relents, 'there is too much to move, that won't.' Yet, she keeps stepping with her gaze focused on what wilts and blooms. In her hometown of Houston, she reflects on both literal and metaphorical landscapes, 'where streetlights bust out and stay busted.' She's bold in her witnessing though her poems seem to palpate under her exacting 'knife, the sharp edge / that we use to make something, / Even if it disappears.' In this brilliant volume, Schwartz instructs best in how she navigates loss. 'Let me walk unsteadily. / Let me lose and lose / my body in parts while I watch and sing anyway.' Her verse though sorrow-tinged—shouts a powerful song of resistance. She bade us sing no matter what we withstand."
—Glenis Redmond