Leslie Schwartz is the author of two literary novels, Jumping the Green (Simon & Schuster, 1999) and Angels Crest (Doubleday, 2004.) Jumping the Green won the James Jones Literary Society Award for Best First Novel and was published in three languages.  Angels Crest was a Book Sense 76 pick and was published in nine languages. The film version of the book debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival and the Edinburgh Film Festival in April and June of 2011. It was released nationally in the United States in January.

In 2004 Schwartz was named Kalliope Magazine's Woman Writer of the Year.

For the last ten years, she has taught creative writing at UCLA Extension, the University of Iowa Summer Writers Festival and at prisons, low-income public high schools and gang intervention agencies. Her latest stint, teaching creative writing at the nation's largest gang intervention agency, Homeboy Industries, resulted in the creation of a literary magazine called the Homeboy Review. The magazine was created to bridge the gap between mainstream, established writers and those who write from the margins and to create a broad community of literature for all audiences. After five years Schwartz left Homeboy Industries to finish her third bood and began to publish a new literary journal, Charlotte: A Journal of Literature and Art. (Writers of all genres may submit between the months of May through December to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .)

Recently, Schwartz taught the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read Initiative in the California Department of Corrections, a pilot program that brings the Big Read, normally geared for public schools and community organizations, into lock-up facilities. Awards include three artist-in-residence literary grants from the City of Los Angeles, and a literary grant from the California Council for the Humanities and PEN USA. She most recently won the West Hollywood/Algonquin Award for Public Service in the Arts and was the president of PEN USA in 2007.

Schwartz has been a frequent speaker at the annual Associated Writing Programs conferences, the Los Angeles Library ALOUD series and the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. For five years, until 2007, she wrote a twice-monthly column for the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses in New York City.

She recieved her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Pacific University, one of the top five low-residency programs in the United States and is writing  her third novel, currently title E.E.