Leslie Ullman Author & Writing Consultant

Author of four poetry collections and numerous reviews and craft essays, Leslie Ullman taught for twenty-seven years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas-El Paso, where she established the Bilingual MFA Program. Now a Professor Emerita at UTEP, she continues to teach in the low-residency MFA Writing Program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts, where she has been on the faculty since 1981. She also does freelance manuscript consultations and guest-teaching. Through long experience of mentoring adults and motivated undergraduates, both in academic settings and at writers conferences and retreats, Ullman has developed a teaching/editing style aimed at drawing writers out and helping them not only to discover their potential as thinkers and writers, but also to value the process itself, with all its starts and stops and changes of direction.

In recent years, Ullman has worked as a certified ski instructor in the Ernie Blake Snowsports School at Taos Ski Valley. She also makes and sells handmade necklaces, Bead Poems composed of natural materials such as ammonites and shells combined with carved jade, bone, turquoise, Murano glass, pewter, ceramic and antique glass beads.

Born in Illinois in 1947, Ullman graduated from Skidmore College and received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Her first poetry collection, Natural Histories, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Dreams by No One's Daughter, followed from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Slow Work Through Sand was published by University of Iowa as a co-winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, and her fourth collection, Progress on the Subject of Immensity, was released by University of New Mexico Press. She has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Shenandoah, Numero Cinq, Poetry, The New Yorker, Poet Lore, The Cape Rock, and Solstice Literary Review. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Numero Cinq, and The Writer's Chronicle.

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