When you champion creative process over product, you allow yourself to connect with authenticity and joy.
Megan Leonard (she/they) is the many-greats granddaughter of Mercy Disbrow, a woman accused of witchcraft in 1692 during the New England witch panic, and the central character in her collection Mercy, which will be available in early 2027. Drawn to research and archives, in this collection Leonard fuses primary historical accounts and family narrative to create an explosive book that reckons with the aftermath of family secrets, and asks who is allowed to be angry—and what is the cost of that rage.
Leonard is also the author of Dear ____, a chapbook of epistolary poems and artwork born out of the Write ME Project organized by the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Available from Milk & Cake Press in December 2026, Dear ____, explores the inner landscape of silence, self-reflection, and spirituality, against a backdrop of winter, isolation, and frozen landscape.
Photo by Kathleen Maris Paltrineri
Meg served on the faculty for the Connors Writing Center at the University of New Hampshire for fifteen years, and she currently serves joyfully on the board of the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program. She has been mentoring writers for over twenty years.
Megan Leonard is also the author of Larkspur Queen (Broadstone Books, 2025) and book of lullabies (Milk & Cake Press, 2020). Meg is a mad, sick writer and a guest speaker on disability poetics.
A sample list of journals and presses where writers mentored by Meg have published:
Bellevue Literary Review
Blueline
Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review
The Carolina Quarterly
The Dodge
Electric Literature
The Fourth River
Front Porch
Glass Poetry Press
The Kenyon Review
Lily Poetry Review
Literary Mama
Mom Egg Review
One Art
Pank Magazine
Peacock Journal
Pine Row Press
River Heron Review
Rust + Moth
SWWIM Everyday
Tupelo Quarterly