Raina León lives, works and creates from Philadelphia and is available to travel for speaking engagements and creative coaching!

You can contact The Speakeasy Project directly for more info.

Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is the 2026-2027 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. 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 co-founded the Wild Indigo Poetry Reading Series (2024) in Germantown, Philadelphia with Sarah Browning in deep partnership with Young American Cider and Reclaim Philadelphia, which will celebrate two years of programming in September 2026. She is a recipient of a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Grant, a Leeway Transformation Award (2025), Letras Boricuas Fellowship (2025), and a Velocity Fund Grant (2026). She 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 is professor emerita there. She teaches poets and writers at the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine and will teach poetry at Bryn Mawr College as a visiting professor starting in Fall 2026. She is additionally a digital archivist, emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer. She is an enrolled Higuayagua Taíno tribal member and (very slowly) learning Hiwatahia.

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Raina León is a teacher, writer, artist, curator, scholar, digital archivist, and speaker. You might know her as a founding editor of The Acentos Review, the co-founder of Wild Indigo Poetry Reading Series, the author of black god mother this body, and co-founder of StoryJoy, Inc. with Dr. Norma Thomas.