Dr. 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 of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. 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 The Watering Hole, the Obsidian Foundation, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, 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. She is a recipient of a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Grant. She recently 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 currently supports poets and writers at the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine. She is additionally a digital archivist, emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer.

POETRY: “Scenes in the life of a lesser angel,” Poetry

POETRY: "All around, he’s there,” “An owl questions with a human face,” “Phoebe,” and others, Connotation Press

POETRY: “Banned portrait in the MAGA era: Study says black girls are ‘less innocent,’” Jung Journal

ARTICLE: "Humanizing Online Teaching," Saint Mary’s College of California

Hybridity/interdisciplinary arts and ekphrastic writing

A workshop studying Black feminist authors who write about the body as (mis)understood within medical spaces. Students will start with an external perception of embodied experience through our interrogation of our own medical records.

A workshop for the emerging writer. Have you ever felt lost in your own writing? Your writing dreams are myriad and arrive like a flood around you. What is this creation and how will it live beyond this page (and should it)?