How to Tell a True Love Story

Leslie Jill Patterson teaches in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University, where she serves as editor of Iron Horse Literary Review. Her prose has appeared in Texas Monthly, Gulf Coast, River Teeth, Brevity, Fourth Genre, The Rumpus, Hotel Amerika, and Hunger Mountain, among others. Her awards include an Embrey Human Rights Fellowship, a Soros Justice Fellowship granted by the Open Society Foundations, the Richard J. Margolis Award for Nonfiction Writers of Social Justice Journalism, and a Pushcart Prize. Since 2009, Patterson has worked as the case storyteller for public defenders representing indigent men and women charged with capital murder and facing the death penalty across the American South.