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 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); the letterpress edition Indelibility (1999); and, most recently, The Colosseum Critical Introduction to Rhina P. Espaillat (2021).