Summary
David M. de León is a Puerto Rican academic, poet and performer. Their critical work is on contemporary Black poetry and poetics.
David's first academic book, Black Epic: Poetics in the Time of Black Lives Matter, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
Awards include the Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize for a Dissertation on African or African-American Art, a Best of the Net Award in Poetry and finalist for book prizes at PANK and Button Poetry.
Research interests
- Contemporary poetry
- Black studies
- African American literature
- Poetics and poetic formalism
- Popular music and sound studies
- Afrofuturisms and marginalized futurity
- Lantix poetics
- Queer and trans studies
Selected publications
Academic
- Step Right Up: The Many Minstrel Shows of Tyehimba Jess’s Olio
- Black Epic: Poetics in the Time of Black Lives Matter, Forthcoming Duke University Press 2027
Selected poetry
- Three poems in Ate Mais: Until More, the Anthology of Latinx Futurisms
- ‘Lamento Borincano‘ in The Volta
- ‘The Cats of Old San Juan‘ in At Length Magazine
- Three Poems in The Indiana Review
- ‘Diaspora‘ and ‘Bermuda Triangle‘ in AGNI
- ‘On a Field in the Present‘ in Pleiades Magazine
- Two poems in Up the Staircase Quarterly
- ‘El Moro‘ in PANK's Latinx Literature Folio
- Three poems in PANK
- Two poems in At Length Magazine
- Two poems in Acentos Review
- ‘Songs to Water part 2: I, II, IX‘ in Diagram
- ‘Not Everything I Do Is Magic‘ in Rattle
- ‘Who Keeps Weathervanes Anymore?‘ in Anderbo
Non-fiction
Interviews
- "Game Is Life: Basketball, poetry, and the NBA playoffs" with Kaveh Akbar, Vivian Lee, Ben Purkert, and Nabila Lovelace
- "Michael R. Jackson and Lileana Blain-Cruz On How the Pandemic Changed Theater"
Prose
Academic presentations
- Montuño: Poetics, Improvisation, and Liveness, Pratt University
- Step Right Up: Mask and Performance in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus, Podcast for The Beautiful Struggle: Blackness, the Archive, and the Speculative with Daphne Brooks
- Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, Podcast for The Beautiful Struggle: Blackness, the Archive, and the Speculative with Daphne Brooks
- “The Booty Don’t Lie”: Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist WondaLand, I Love Pop conference, CUNY Grad Center
- “Kendrick Lamar and Hip-Hop Prosody”, History of the English Language, Roberta Frank
Education
- Ph.D., Yale University
- M.A. & M.Phil, Yale University
- B.A., Hunter College CUNY