Work samples

  • No Way Out But Down

    "No Way Out But Down" was published in Sixfold's 2023 summer issue. Sixfold is a writer voted magazine, and "No Way Out But Down" was voted into third place. I first drafted this story in January of 2022, locked in my room after a very close COVID exposure that led to me believe that it was only a matter of days before I got sick. Though I managed to avoid it (that time), the paranoid spiral produced this piece.

  • 新年快樂_1.pdf

    "新年快樂," which translates to "Happy New Year," was published in Lunchbox Zine, Emerson College's zine for Asian-identifying students, in 2022.

  • Mom Says It's My Turn in the Body

    "Mom Says It's My Turn in the Body" was published in 2022 in Bag of Bones Press's This is Too Tense anthology, an anthology of present tense second person horror. This piece was written in response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The detail about Millie's body in the story is a direct reference from the testimony of Dr. Roy Guerrero, a Uvalde pediatrician who treated many of the victims. This horror continues to play out across our country every day.

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About Zoe

Baltimore County

Zoe Leonard is a writer from Phoenix, Maryland. She attended the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore and went on to earn her BFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston. Zoe is a Kundiman fellow and typically works multi-genre with poetry and prose. She is currently working on a manuscript that blends fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and spells to explore her own queerness and what it means to straddle disparate identities.

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Wolf/Girl Working Manuscript

This is a sample from my working manuscript. This is a first rough draft, and the title is still a working title. I began working on this manuscript in 2022 for my senior creative thesis at Emerson as a way to explore my own gender nonconformity and disparate identities. What does it mean to be two things at once? I hadn't openly come out as queer when I started writing this. In the summer of 2023 I attended my first Kundiman retreat spent some time with trans writer and activist Ryka Aoki, who helped me step out of the closet and see my work for what it really was: queer literature. After coming out to myself, my writing exploded. For the first time I was able to write clearly and explicitly on topics that I had been skirting around with metaphors and masking. While this story is still primarily a work of fiction, I feel that it is now grounded in an exploration of my queer identity in reality. 

  • Wolf/Girl Working Manuscript

    • Voicemails

    I'm experimenting with a new type of performance piece delivered through voicemails. The idea is that when I perform a piece, I call an actual person and leave it in their voicemail box. This is still a very new project, but I've been having fun with it.

    • voicemail-1 (secret)

      Transcript: "I wanna tell you a secret, but I don’t know the best time to call you. Will you let me know when you’re available? I’m bleeding from the nose again and crying. Aren’t you dying to know what happened to me this time? It was incredible, but I know you’re busy. Get some sleep. Dream of me, and text me tomorrow. When you receive this message I’ll be awake and on my phone. I love you. I’m still bleeding. I’ll call you tomorrow."

    • voicemail-2 (lottery numbers)

      Transcript: "Hey those numbers, those lottery numbers you gave me that you said a genie told you…well I went to the corner store like you said and I put in those numbers, and not only were they not winners, but they were a secret code to an underground cockfighting ring. Yeah. The cashier said, “Follow me” and I was like, “Did I win something?” and he said, “Win? I wouldn't know, you gotta ask Bobby.” And then we went into the storage room and he opened a trap door. So I'm going down this tunnel right, that looks like it was dug by hand, and all the lights are dim and red and I realize there's no cash, I'm about to be murdered. But then I meet Bobby, and the first thing he said to me was, “You got a cock? You don't look like the type, but you never know these days.” I’m like, yeah I think I'm in the wrong place. But yeah we figured it out, and they let me go.

    • voicemail-3 (sweet sixteen)

      Transcript: “Hey so my Aunt Helen called me the other day about my cousin Savannah. She's turning 16 soon and she's having a sweet 16 party that I'm supposed to help with. So my aunt’s kind of weird, and her kid is kind of weird–she's really into the French Revolution right now and wants to have a French Revolution themed birthday party. Which is like, okay, you know, we can get the costumes and the wigs and the Mary Antoinette cake, uh but she uh wants to have a guillotine and I am supposed to be in charge of that. So, basically I was wondering if I could use your workshop or if you're open to commissions for this kind of thing? And budget is not a problem. And I did already look up if it was legal, and lucky for us we’re actually in one of the five states where it is legal to have a working guillotine on private property. It does have to be sharp because it does have to work, and I think we're looking for it to be around 10 to 12 feet tall.

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