Leslie Jill Patterson

Leslie Jill Patterson’s prose has appeared in Texas Monthly, 1966, Grist, Gulf Coast, Baltimore Review, The New Guard, Colorado Review, Literature: A Pocket Anthology (7th edition), and Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays from Barrelhouse. Her awards include two Kimmel-Harding Nelson residencies; a Texas Commission on the Arts fellowship; a 2012 Embrey Human Rights Fellowship; the 2013 Everett Southwest Literary Award, judged by Lee K. Abbott; the 2014 Time and Place Prize in Brittany, France; and a 2014 Soros Justice Fellowship, funded by the Open Society Foundations in New York. Additionally, she founded and edits Iron Horse Literary Review, serves as copyeditor for Creative Nonfiction, and was a 2016 blogger for Ploughshares. Today, she has a growing interest in social justice literature and works as the case storyteller for public defenders representing indigent men and women charged with capital murder and facing the death penalty in the state of Texas. She has served capital defense teams on over twenty cases.