This Afro-Boricua wrote her first poem when she was in the third grade and has been imagining, creating, and connecting with others through poetry ever since. Raina León's womanist and Afrocentric poems, as well as her fiction and academic work, have been published in more than 100 journals and anthologies. She's also a founding editor of the Acentos Review, an online quarterly publication devoted to the promotion of Latinx arts, and a professor of education at Saint Mary's College of California (she is the first Afro-Latina to hold that title there). To her, poetry and any creative practice is rooted in community, and it's everywhere — so its growing presence and popularity on social media is only natural. "Poetry is breath. It is always as central as that, and social media is just the vehicle right now," she tells POPSUGAR. "Before, it was the speakeasy, the party after the jazz show, the salon, the public theater."
