Leigh Sugar (she/her) is a writer, editor, educator, and, most importantly, learner. Her debut poetry collection, FREELAND, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2025, and she created and edited That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and poetry by artists teaching in carceral settings (New Village Press, 2023). She has taught courses and workshops at the Institute for Justice and Opportunity, NYU, Poetry Foundation, Hugo House, Justice Arts Coalition, and other sites, both in person and online. Her work appears in POETRY, jubilat, Split this Rock, and more. An associate producer for Rachel Zucker’s poetry podcast Commonplace: Conversations with poets (and other people), Leigh holds an MFA in poetry from NYU, where she facilitated free creative writing workshops for war veterans as a 2017/2018 Veteran Writers Fellow, and a Master of Public Administration specializing in Criminal Justice Policy, from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. A University of Michigan Hopwood Writing Awardee, Leigh lives in Michigan with her pup.

"FREELAND is a vibrant conjuring of a kinder, wiser world. In these magnificently concise and surprising poems, Leigh Sugar maps the many paths connecting grief to compassion. Her generosity of spirit manifests in every poem."
—Idra Novey

"FREELAND is a book in which possibility is with every word measured against reality, and though with every word reality is shown to fall short, the poems never collapse into fantasy, even when fantasy is described—it is a book that recognizes possibility is the biggest and most crucial part of reality. And because it sees the world so clearly, FREELAND is a lament, and because it says what it sees so directly, FREELAND instills its ache."
—Shane McCrae