Official Bio
Leslieann Hobayan is a poet, essayist, activist mom, and host of the podcast, Spiritual Grit, a show about spirituality and activism. Her chapbook, Divorce Papers: A Slow Burn is out from Finishing Line Pressand her poetry manuscript, Jeepney Girl: An Archipelago, was a finalist for the Trio House Press Open. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a 2018 Best of the Net, her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Aster(ix) Journal, The Grief Diaries, The Lantern Review, The Mom Egg Review, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit, and elsewhere. A VONA alum, she has been awarded fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation/Millay Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and artist grants from Community of Writers and the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers Conference. Currently teaching at Rutgers University, she’s also a spiritual mentor for women of color, a yoga & meditation teacher, a tarot reader, and facilitates sacred healing circles for people of color.
You can find her on Instagram @leslieannhobayan and on Substack: Adventures in Midlife! and Leslieann’s Raw, Drafty-Draft Poems
What People Are Saying
“In these poems, which are by turns tender and brutally honest, Leslieann Hobayan writes directly into the dissolution of a certain way of being in the world and the radical reconstruction of another, gloriously luminous, life.”
–Camille Dungy, author of Trophic Cascade
“To trace dissolution as oath, as testimony, is a radical act of orbiting back to one’s primal essence. In Divorce Papers: A Slow Burn by Leslieann Hobayan, the intimate, epistolary address takes on bold, visceral octaves––from speaker to the looming ex, her beloved children, the future self––rendering personal contemplations as communal insights. Hobayan archives the disintegration of a marriage to survey forlorn devotion, shifting power dynamics, and emergent ardor amidst a global crisis. Fissures are laid bare, probed, and offered up like incantations and anthems to declare: ‘So I refuse this union // dispute its viability // break off, break free––'”
–Su Hwang, author of Bodega
Leslieann Hobayan 