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Poetry Consultations with Raina J. León

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, among other creative communities. 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 with 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 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 now holds professor emerita status, the first Black person to achieve the rank there and third Latinx person. 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.

Raina will provide detailed comments on your manuscript as well as a cover letter. After receiving these files, participants who submit chapbooks and full-length manuscripts may also book phone/video conferences with her at no additional charge.

Raina is accepting single poems, folios, chapbooks, and full-length collections for critique. The fees and parameters for each of these categories are as follows:

  • Individual Poems, up to 2 pages in length, $25
  • Folios, up to 7 pages in length, not to include more than 5 poems, $55
  • Chapbooks, 16-40 pages in length, $275
  • Full-length collections, 45-80 pages in length $425

All manuscripts should be formatted in 12-point font. The deadline to submit work for this consultation program is September 30. Raina will complete her work and respond to all participants by October 31.

Consultations

Poetry Consultations with Raina J. León

Click Here to Submit Deadline: September 30 How to submit ›

Statement of Purpose

Who are you as a creative in the world?  What inspires you and with whom is your work in conversation?  What are your dreams for your work and who will receive it?  I begin every consult with questions and often suggest other texts, videos, playlists, forms to complement your work.

As I read your work, I am cultivating a sensitivity to how my own body receives it.  I read deeply for what I understand to be the intention (which I ask you to enlighten me to before I read so that I can honor it as best I can).  I look at the fine details of the form:  its music, its use of the page and space, how the lines begin and end, how meaning is constructed.  I ask questions, too, about how the form revealed itself as the best vessel for the poem, how that form has become a bridge of conveyance from one experience to another.

I love to talk about revision and organization within a manuscript, considering together what the narrative or emotional arch is of the emerging manuscript and how the poems push towards revelation in how they work together.  I am also interested in those manuscripts that don’t consider cohesion and are more interested in collecting individually structured exemplars in lyric, whole in and of themselves, that in their relationship to one another reveal a multifacetedness of reality, a complexity that is unique and also celebratory of the complexity of a community of readers and beings.

For those interested in augmenting their work, I love cultivating reading lists and pushing folks to explore other artistic forms as a way of deepening their attention to an obsession or iconic invitation to deep relationship with a subject.  I am someone with deep experience in dance, music, visual art, critique, fabric arts, etc, so I love to pull from these various modes of expression in offering prompts to those interested.

In my own work, I cultivate deep relationship in community, those of the present and those within my lineage through exploration of archival resources and documents.  I have a podcast with my mother, Generational Archives, which serves as this wonderful integration between spiritual revelation and ancestral reciprocal response, mother-daughter love and appreciation for one another, archival and genealogical research, and poetry.  I am also someone who has a keen ear for the sonic work happening on the page and a love of playing with forms, including experimentations in hybridity.  I am also someone who has worked with the incorporation of polyvocality through various techniques and used multiple languages in my work.  Those who are multilingual folks would find an eager reader in me, one who is resistant to the urge of explanation in italics.

Writers whose work I love and read include folks like Jasminne Mendez, Lupe Mendez, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Aracelis Girmay, John Murillo, Nicole Sealey, Evie Shockley, Craig Santos Perez, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Martín Espada, Sandra María Esteves, Yesenia Montilla, Jenise Miller, Sarah Rafael García, Faith Adiele, Denise Frohman, Kirwyn Sutherland, Tongo Eisen-Martin, among many others.

© Matteo Monchiero

Raina J. León

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, among other creative communities. 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 with 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 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 now holds professor emerita status, the first Black person to achieve the rank and third Latinx person. 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.

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Works By Raina J. León

Profeta Without Refuge Book Jacket

Profeta Without Refuge

Raina J. León

$13.00

How to Submit

Black Lawrence Press accepts submissions and payment of the entry fee exclusively through our online submission manager, Submittable. We are not able to accept submissions via email or postal mail.

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