Aya de León
Aya de León is a Black/Puerto Rican author who teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley. She is the current poet laureate of the City of Berkeley. Aya’s novels have won the Northern California Book Award, the Jane Addams prize for social justice children’s literature, two first-place International Latino Book Awards and three first place Independent Publisher Awards. Her Justice Hustlers series has also been optioned for television. A former spoken word poet and hip hop theater artist, Aya’s work has also appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Ebony, Guernica, The Guardian UK, Writers Digest, Bitch Magazine, VICE, The Root, Ploughshares, and on Def Poetry, and she was recently interviewed in The New York Times. Aya has an intersectional memoir-in-progress about race, gender, war, body image, and the environment. In spring 2022, she organized an online conference entitled “Black Literature vs. the Climate Emergency” (available on YouTube). In addition, she does climate organizing with the Black Hive, the climate justice formation at the Movement for Black Lives.
10th Anniversary Festival
Speaker - Climate Fiction as a Tool for Climate Justice