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 in The Rumpus, Rigorous, Barely South Review, Generations Literary Journal, The New York Quarterly, Phati’tude, Growing Up Filipino II, 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. Her collaborative art installation (with woodturner artist Michael Badger), Cartography of Water: Home, Memory, & Identity in the Diaspora, which explored the fluidity of home and its temporal and spatial locations, was on exhibit at Vermont Studio Center in April 2017. 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.
