Jennifer De Leon is a highly accomplished American author, editor, speaker, and professor of creative writing. She was born in the Boston area to immigrant parents from Guatemala and spent her early career working in public schools and designing college access programs. De Leon is a graduate of Connecticut College, where she studied International Relations, and holds a MA in Teaching from the University of San Francisco and an MFA in Creative Writing from UMASS-Boston.
De Leon has published her work in over a dozen literary magazines and anthologies, including Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Best Women’s Travel Writing. She is the author of the YA novel, Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From (Simon & Schuster, 2020), and the essay collection White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing (UMass Press, 2021), which received the Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She also edited the anthology Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), which won an International Latino Book Award. Her YA novel, Borderless, was released in February 2023.
In addition to her work as an author and editor, De Leon is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Framingham State University and a faculty member in the Creative Writing & Literature Master Program at Harvard University. She has been recognized for her writing with several awards, including the 2011 Fourth Genre Michael Steinberg Essay Prize, and has received scholarships and residencies from prestigious programs such as the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, and the Macondo Writers’ Workshop. De Leon currently resides outside of Boston with her husband and two sons.