Ditmas Lit

Leslie-Ann Murray is a fiction writer from Trinidad & Tobago, and a citizen of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She created Brown Girl Book Lover, a social media platform where she interviews diverse writers and reviews books that should be at the forefront of our imagination. Leslie-Ann is working on her first nonfiction essay collection, This Has Made Us Beautiful, about incarceration, race, immigration, education, and the overwhelming impact of these political forces on herself, the boys and men in her life, and the women in her community. She has been published in Poets & Writers, Zone 3, Ploughshares, Blackbird Journal, The Rumpus, The Audacity, and Salamander Literary Magazine. 

Ryan Teitman is the author of the poetry collections Litany for the City (BOA Editions, 2012) and Paperweight (University of Akron Press, 2026), winner of the Akron Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, and The Yale Review, and his awards include a…