Leonora Desar

Leonora Desar published her first story at the age of eight. It was about flamingos in the Bronx Zoo and appeared in the school paper. While she didn’t become famous, she did make her best friend very jealous.

In high school, Leonora sat in on her first creative writing class. She found it terrifying. The professor shared a short story, which sounded amazing. Then the professor said students would be sharing their own work, which was not amazing. How, Leonora wondered, did one write a story? What made it good? (She knew the one they read in class was good…but why?) And where the heck did one get an idea? She sensed the flamingos had been a fluke.

It took Leonora about 15 years to start figuring it out. She wrote a lot of bad first drafts. She pressed the delete button a lot. She sent her articles to newspapers who didn’t reply and left one very rambling voicemail. Ultimately, she earned an MS from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and an MFA in creative writing from NYU. Her work has appeared in Psychology Today, Parenting magazine, WomansDay.com, and elsewhere. Seventy-one of her fiction pieces have been published. 

Now, she loves helping students. She demystifies the writing process, breaking it down into manageable steps. She tells students what she wishes someone had told her years ago—that writing is not about talent, magic, or even flamingos—it’s a skill that can be taught.