Leslieann Hobayan is a poet-writer, devoted yogi, and a member of VONA, a community dedicated to writers of color. Nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net 2018, her work is forthcoming and has appeared in The Rumpus, Lantern Review, Asteri(x) Journal, The Grief Diaries, and Rigorous, among others. 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. She’s also a 500-hr registered yoga teacher, leading classes in pranayama & meditation, Hatha/vinyasa, Kundalini yoga, and Bhakti flow.