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. 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 has been interviewed for “By the Book” 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). She currently does intergenerational cultural organizing with the Working Families Party, the Movement for Black Lives, and ADJNCEA (pronounced “agency”), a Black climate, environmental and food justice network in Northern California.
2025 Inside Ideas
Speaker – Art as Radical Practice: Black Women’s Creative Expression as Social Change
2025 Bookworm Blockparty
Speaker – Incantations to Open Portals
2025 Headliners
Introducer – The Embodiment of Care
Moderator Introducer – Portable Intersectionality: Roxane Gay in conversation with Alicia Garza
