“I love books . I adore everything about them.”

Creator & Host of Award-winning Author Interview Series|Writers Interviewing Writers. Featuring warm & thoughtful interviews each week since 2013.

Author of Speaking of Apraxia: A Parents’ Guide to Childhood Apraxia of Speech, now in its 2nd edition as an audiobook from Penguin Random House, narrated by the author.

In-Progress: Model Home: A Memoir

“I love the feel of the pages on my fingertips. They are light enough to carry, yet so heavy with worlds and ideas . I love the sound of the pages flicking against my fingers. Print against fingerprints. Books make people quiet, yet they are so loud.”

― Nnedi Okorafor 
THE BOOK OF PHOENIX

Credits & Acknowledgements: Leslie’s writing and photography have been featured in various print and online literary journals, including The Rumpus, Psychology Today, Brevity, The Millions, The Smart Set, Hippocampus Magazine, The Florida Review, Mutha Magazine, MER Literary, The Nervous Breakdown, Literary Mama, Manifest-Station, Motherwell, Cleaver Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Ruminate’s The Waking, Tiferet Journal, The Mighty, among others. Her work has been nominated for Best American Short Stories. Leslie has been recognized by Jane Friedman as one of the most influential book reviewers.

She drives a deep interest in place and how that shapes us, and the interstitial connection of family, dysfunction, and the symmetry and parallels of nature. As a visual artist, her focus is on deteriorating architecture. Designed to be huge forces of permanence, these structures are continually being challenged, destroyed, and forgotten. They possess an energized present—and presence—as they attempt to escape their fragmented reality.

Leslie is a former child/adolescent psychiatric R.N. at the Mayo Clinic and has attended writing classes and workshops at Northwestern University, Story Studio Chicago, Corporeal Writing, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was accepted to the Kenyon Writing Workshop. She resides in the Chicago area.