My full name is Leonardo Ríos Márquez, but everyone calls me Leo, in either English or Spanish. When asked which one I prefer, I always say, “Whatever feels good is good.”

Believe it or not, I started writing fiction because Facebook was asking me to write an About Me section. I was eighteen years old. No one had ever asked me to write anything besides an essay. So I wrote little stories about me, embellished them with details about things that never happened, words that no one said. Pretty soon, during those late-night coffee-induced writing sessions (I was an English major in college) I was writing fiction in my essays and more fiction on Facebook. I loved it. 

Nowadays, I live in Tucson, Arizona. Favorite books I’ve read recently are Mama Said by Kristen Gentry, Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine, and The Molino by Melani Martínez. I gained twenty pounds during the pandemic, but I’m on the yoga and steadily losing weight. I still get up every morning and dream about writing. Today, just for fun, I wrote this bio to tell you a little bit about me. This time, unlike those Facebook days, it’s all true.