Leslie McGrath

Leslie McGrath is a Connecticut native whose poems have been widely published. Called “an oral historian of the alienated” by The Washington Independent Review of Books, McGrath's poetic themes reflect her early training in clinical psychology.

Winner of the 2004 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, her first collection of poetry, Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage (Main Street Rag, 2009), was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. She co-edited Radha Says (Drunken Boat Media, 2010), the posthumous poetry collection of Reetika Vazirani. McGrath's first chapbook, Toward Anguish, was published by the Providence Athenaeum in 2007. A second chapbook, By the Windpipe (ELJ Books, 2014), focused on mental illness and the history of its treatment.

Her second full length book of poetry, Out From the Pleiades: A Picaresque Novella in Verse (Jaded Ibis Press, 2014) explored the development of a female bully.

She is the series editor for The Tenth Gate, an imprint for mid-career poets (The Word Works). McGrath teaches creative writing and literature part time at Central CT State University.

Feminists Are Passing From Our Lives, McGrath's third book, will be published by The Word Works in 2018.