Unsolicited Press Presents a Reading with Kendra Preston Leonard and Emily Kiernan

Emily Kiernan is the author of a novel, Great Divide (Unsolicited Press). Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Pank, The Collagist, Redivider, JMWW, The Conium Review, Unstuck, and numerous other journals. She has received support from The MacDowell Colony, The Ucross Foundation, The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, among other organizations. She holds an MFA in Writing and Critical Studies from The California Institute of the Arts, and is a prose editor at Noemi Press and a fiction editor at Rivet: The Journal of Writing that Risks.


Kendra Preston Leonard is a poet, lyricist, and librettist whose work is inspired by the local, historical, and mythopoeic. She is especially interested in addressing issues of social justice, the environment, and disability through poetry. Her first chapbook, Making Mythology, was published in 2020 by Louisiana Literature Press, and her work appears in numerous publications including vox poetica, lunch, These Fragile Lilacs, and Upstart: Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed. Leonard collaborates regularly with composers on works for voice including new operas and song cycles. Her lyrics and libretti have been set by composers including Jessica Rudman, Rosśa Crean, and Allyssa Jones. The author of numerous scholarly books and articles, Leonard is also a musicologist and music theorist, and her academic work focuses on women and music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; music and the early modern; and music and screen history. Follow her on Twitter at @K_Leonard_PhD or visit her site at https://kendraprestonleonard.hcommons.org/. 
​