About Leona

Leona Sevick’s second book of poems, The Bamboo Wife, is published by Trio House Press (2024). She is the winner of the 2017 Press 53 Poetry Award for her first full-length collection of poems, Lion Brothers. Her work appears in Blackbird, Birmingham Poetry Review, Orion, The Southern Review, The Sun, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, and The Threepenny Review.

Sevick is the first place winner of the Split This Rock poetry contest, judged by Naomi Shihab Nye. She has been a finalist for The Washington Prize, the Pleiades Press Editors Prize, and Four Way Books’ Levis Prize. She was named a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholar and a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Fellow for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has been supported by residencies at The Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Leona earned a doctorate in English language and literature from the University of Maryland and serves as a member of the advisory board for the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center and the board of directors for the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is provost and professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature.