Patrick De Leon
Patrick De Leon is a queer Latinx poet, multidisciplinary artist, educator, and PhD student in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing, with a focus in poetry, from Arizona State University in 2025. Raised in working-class Los Angeles by Guatemalan and Mexican immigrant parents, Patrick brings questions of migration, cultural inheritance, sexuality, and belonging to both his artistic practice and scholarly research.
Working across poetry, dramatic writing, video, and printmaking, Patrick explores desire, shame, intimacy, religious inheritance, and the tensions between secrecy and visibility. His creative and scholarly work approaches the body as an archive of cultural memory, examining how gesture, ritual, and performance carry histories of constraint alongside possibilities for survival and transformation. His artistic work has been supported by a Lambda Literary fellowship in playwriting, a Writers of Native Nations scholarship in poetry at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and the Fellowship for Cultural Exchange in the Literary Arts from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. He also served as an artist in residence with thems.Phx, a queer arts collective in Phoenix.
Patrick’s doctoral research integrates visual art, creative writing, and scholarship as interconnected methods of inquiry and knowledge production. Grounded in queer of color critique and feminist and decolonial approaches, his research centers on queer Latinx masculinities and sexualities within contexts shaped by colonialism, racialization, migration, and Catholic moral frameworks. He is particularly interested in queer intimacy as ceremony and in how secrecy can function as both an imposed condition and a practice of protection, agency, and care. His developing project extends these questions into queer Chicanx cultural organizing, exploring how art, literature, performance, and community archives reshape inherited gender expectations and create forms of collective belonging.