Leslie Monsour

Poet Leslie Monsour was born in Hollywood, California, and she grew up in Mexico City, Chicago, and Panama. She attended Scripps College in Claremont, California, and the Canal Zone College in Panama, and earned a BA in English literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she also minored in Hispanic literature. She is the author of the the full-length poetry collection The Alarming Beauty of the Sky (2005); the chapbooks The House Sitter (2011), Travel Plans (2001), and Earth’s Beauty, Desire, & Loss (1998); and the letterpress edition Indelibility (1999). 

A skilled practitioner of traditional forms, Monsour often sets her poems in the landscape of Southern California. Her work has been published in many anthologies, including New Formalist Poets of the American West (2001), Visiting Emily: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Emily Dickinson (2001), and A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women (1994).

Monsour is also the author of Rhina Espaillat: A Critical Introduction (2013). She and the poet Timothy Steele co-hosted the colloquium “Otherwise We Fall into Prose: Formal Poetry in California” at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, in 2003. Monsour’s critical essays on the poets Richard Wilbur, Dana Gioia, Rhina Espaillat, and Sor Juana are published in journals such Able Muse, The Edge City Review, and Mezzo Cammin.

Monsour was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2007, and she is an independent scholar at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.