Raina Léon

Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from 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/fellow of Anaphora, the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo, VONA, The Watering Hole, and Obsidian. 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 Baldwin for the Arts, Community of Writers, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, 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 and currently working on an anthology of the first 15 years of The Acentos Review with FlowerSong Press.

She retired early as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there. She is a professor emerita (first Black person and first Latina) at that university. She co-founded and co-hosts the Wild Indigo Poetry Series in Philadelphia with Sarah Browning. She also co-founded and co-hosts the podcast, Generational Archives, with her mother, Dr. Norma D. Thomas, that explores ancestral recovery and reclamation through archival research. She is additionally a digital archivist, emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer. A recent happening in her career that makes her especially proud is having had her poetry recorded for preservation at the Library of Congress PALABRA Archive (a partnership with Letras Latinas) in the studio right next to where Pablo Neruda, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Langston Hughes added their own voices to the archive.