Leslie Simon

Leslie Simon grew up on the South Side of Chicago and came to the Bay Area in 1974. A year later, she founded Poetry for the People, a class and a publishing and performing collective at City College of San Francisco. She also founded and coordinated Project SURVIVE, the College’s award winning and nationally recognized sexual violence prevention education program. Simon taught for many years in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department and co-directs, with Ann Wettrich, Groundswell, an architectural literacy program that includes Museum Studies.

Simon is the author of several collections of poetry–Jazz/ is for white girls, too (Poetry for the People), i rise/ you riz/ we born (Artaud’s Elbow), High Desire (Wingbow Press), Collisions and Transformations (Coffee House Press)—and a novel, The Divine Comic (Spuyten Duyvil). She co-authored (with Jan Johnson Drantell) A Music I No Longer Heard: The Early Death of a Parent (Simon and Schuster). She publishes essays on film, literature, and politics.

Simon lives with her husband in San Francisco where their children and grandchildren live in nearby neighborhoods.