Leslieann Hobayan is a poet-writer, yogi, and a member of VONA, a community dedicated to writers of color. Nominated for a Pushcart, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Rigorous, Barely South Review, Generations Literary Journal, The New York Quarterly, Phati’tude, Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina-American Writers, and Pinoy Poetics. She has been awarded the James Merrill Fellowship for Poetry at the Vermont Studio Center, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation writing fellowship for a residency at Millay Colony for the Arts, and an artist grant for the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers Conference. Currently teaching at Rutgers University, she has served as a writing mentor for youth at Urban Word NYC and has taught creative writing at UC-Santa Cruz and Montclair State University. She is at work on a collection of poems as well as a collection of essays.