David M. de León (he/him/any) is a Puerto Rican writer, academic, and theater artist from New Jersey. He has a Ph.D. from Yale university, a B.A. from Hunter College CUNY, and served as a senior editor at The Yale Review.

David’s academic work focuses on contemporary poetry and music, especially book-length poems and concept albums by Black and Latinx artists. His dissertation, Epic Black: Poetics in Protest in the Time of Black Lives Matter, recently won the Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize at Yale. An academic article on Tyehimba Jess’s Olio is forthcoming at African American Review.

David’s poetry manuscript The Cats of Old San Juan was a finalist for the PANK Big Book Prize and the Letras Latinas Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, and a chapbook-length version was a finalist at Button Poetry. His previous manuscript, On a Field in the Present, was shortlisted for the Dorset prize at Tupelo and the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize at Pleiades. He was a Tin House Summer Scholar and a scholarship recipient at the Fine Arts Work Center.

Poetry appears or is forthcoming in places like AGNI, Fence Magazine, [PANK], DIAGRAM, The Indiana Review, The Volta, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Acentos Review, Pleiades, At Length, Strange Horizons, Bat City Review, 2River View, Anderbo, The Cortland Review, Anti-, The Adirondack Review, and the anthologies Até Mais: Until More and Only The Sea Keeps. His poetry is included in Best of the Net 2021.

David’s creative nonfiction explores how minoritized creators use the tropes of science fiction and futurity to build community or re-imagine society’s seeming inevitabilities. He is also interested in popular music, especially how Black and brown artists like Bad Bunny, Tyler the Creator, Lil Nas X, and Janelle Monáe have been grappling with queerness in public ways.

Classes taught include “Serious Play: Improvisation and Culture,” “Other Futures: Marginalized Futurity,” Reading and Writing the Modern Essay,” and “Daily Themes.”

David’s first full-length play was produced in New York in 2014 and he continues to work on short theater around the city, with an emphasis on site-specific works. His TV pilot, co-written with Phoenix Alexander, was a quarterfinalist for the 2020 Screencraft competition in Science Fiction & Fantasy.

Other awards include an Academy of American Poets prize, the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award, the Helen Gray Cone Fellowship for Graduate Studies, a Robert Dudley French fellowship, the Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship, the Miriam Weinberg Richter Award, the McGlinchee Prize for a Play, and the Matthew Ray Weisen Prize.

In his spare time he plays guitar and video games.

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