Luster (Leilani) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1990-91
• Raised—Bronx, New York, and Albany, New York, USA
• Education—M.A., New York University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York

Raven Leilani Baptiste is an American writer whose debut novel, Luster, was published in 2020 under the name Raven Leilani. Her writing, she has said, is influenced by her experiences and her love of art, poetry, comic books and music.

Leilani grew up in a family of artists in the Bronx and later moved to a suburb of Albany, New York. She attended an art high school, aiming for a career as a visual artist. Her first job after college was as an imaging specialist at Ancestry.com., but several jobs, and several years, later she enrolled in New York University's MFA program for creative writing. At NYU she studied under Zadie Smith and with writers Katie Kitamura and Jonathan Safran Foer.

Leilani's writing has also been published in Granta, Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern,
Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. (Adapted rom the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/10/2020.)