Born in Nixburg, Alabama, Rodney Terich Leonard is the author of Sweetgum & Lightning (Four Way Books). His next collection, Another Land of My Body, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. An Air Force veteran who served during the Gulf War, his society profiles and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Red River Review, The Huffington Post, BOMB Magazine, The Cortland Review, Poems in the Afterglow, Poetry Foundation Online, The Southern Review, What Rough Beast, Four Way Review, The New York Times, The Amsterdam News, The Village Voice, For Colored Boys… (anthology edited by Keith Boykin) and other publications. He holds degrees from The New School, NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Teachers College Columbia University. A Callaloo poetry fellow, he received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and currently lives in Manhattan.