Leslie Lindsay is the creator and host of the award-winning author interview series, “Always with a Book.” Since 2013, Leslie, named “One of the most influential book reviewers” by Jane Friedman, ranks in the Top 1% of all GoodReads Reviewers and has conducted over 700 warm, inquisitive conversations with authors as wide-ranging as Robert Kolker and Mary Kubica to Helen Phillips and Mary Beth Keane, making her website a go-to for book lovers world-wide. She also snaps artistic photos of book covers and circulates on social media.

Leslie’s photography has been featured on the cover of Up the Staircase Quarterly; other photography featured in Another Chicago Magazine (ACM), Brushfire Arts & Literature, Invisible City, The Closed Eye Open, Tiferet Journal, Mud Season Review, and Reservoir Road Literary Journal; works of photography short-listed in the Manhattan Review. Promotional book photos have been picked up by publicists representing Doireann Ni Ghiofa, Matt Haig, and Bobi Conn, as well as publishers Little, Brown Spark Simon Kids, and Scholastic.

Leslie’s work has been nominated for the Best American Short Stories. She has contributed to The Millions, The Rumpus, DASH Literary, North American Review (NAR), Brevity, CRAFT Literary, LiteraryHub, The Florida Review, Autofocus, Fractured Literary, Psychology Today, Poets & Writers, Hippocampus Magazine, MER Literary, Motherwell, Manifest-Station, Mutha Magazine, Literary Mama, The Smart Set, The Nervous Breakdown, Pithead Chapel, Mutha Magazine, Literary Mama, The Agapanthus Collective, A Door = Jar, Cleaver Magazine (both craft and prose), The Awakening, Semicolon Literary Magazine, Ruminate’s The Waking, and many other publications. She is at work on a hybrid memoir about her mother’s devolve into psychosis, their subsequent estrangement, her mother’s eventual suicide.

Leslie is the author of the award-winning/#1 Amazon bestseller special needs/parenting/communications disorder book, SPEAKING OF APRAXIA (Woodbine House, 2020), now in its 2nd edition. She has appeared on Language During Mealtime with Becca Eisenberg, CCC-SLP Speechie Side Up with Venita Litvack, CCC-SLP and chatted with Dr. Erik Raj’s graduate level courses about educating future speech-language pathologists. She has also collaborated with various top-ranking pediatric SLPs in her research for SPEAKING OF APRAXIA. The updated, 2nd edition was published by Penguin Random House Audio, narrated by the author.

A cum laude graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia and the Sinclair School of Nursing, Leslie worked as a child/adolescent psychiatric R.N. at the Mayo Clinic before turning to writing full-time. She has continued her education at Northwestern University and the University of Madison-Wisconsin, Story Studio Chicago, and has attended webinars with Creative Nonfiction Magazine (CNF Magazine) featuring Sonja Livingston, Allison K. Williams, Clinton Crockett Peters, Dinty W. Moore, and Chelsea Biondolillo, as well as the NYC New School of Journalism & English, has participated in book discussions and author presentations with The Center For Fiction, Master Class sessions with Penguin Random House’s Author University, Kathy Fish’s The Art of Flash, Corporeal Writing with Lidia Yuknavitch, poetry with Francine Ringold of Nimrod International and Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Tin House Intensive Craft Series: Visual Poetry. Leslie attended the 2023 Kenyon’s Summer Writer’s Workshop working with Victoria Chang in poetry and the Story Studio Chicago Storyboard Workshop with Maya Shanbhag Lang working in memoir. Leslie is a member of Metro Chicago’s premier writing group, Off Campus Writer’s Workshop (OCWW), The Author’s Guild, and has attended retreats at Ragdale.

Leslie is a member of #BindersFullofNovelists, #ReadersCoffeeHouse, #TallPoppyBloggers, is a Books Ambassador with Zibby Books, and partner with Catapult/Softskull/Counterpointas well as a member of The Riverherd Penguin Random House/Riverhead Books. Her Mental Health/Illness Bookshop.org storefront was featured on the fiction & literature homepage of Bookshop.org. She currently lives near Chicago with her husband, two teenaged daughters, and basset hound. She always has a book nearby.