Raven Leilani

Raven Leilani Baptiste (born August 26, 1990) is an American writer who publishes under the name Raven Leilani. Her debut novel, Luster, was released in 2020 to critical acclaim. She grew up as a Seventh-day Adventist, and later left the church. Leilani studied painting in high school and during her freshman year of college, but decided to major in English and Psychology. In 2017, she began pursuing her MFA at New York University, where she studied under Zadie Smith and Katie Kitamura. She has previously taught creative writing at Harvard University. The book's publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux named the book its novel of August 2020 as part of their "Dare to Imagine" campaign. It has been praised by authors Carmen Maria Machado, Brit Bennett, Angela Flournoy, and Zadie Smith. Kirkus Reviews awarded Luster the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Luster was also awarded the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the 2020 John Leonard Prize at the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize, and the 2021 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award

She was named a 2020 "5 Under 35" honoree by the National Book Foundation.

Leilani's writing is influenced by her background as a visual artist, her life experiences, poetry, and a love of comic books and music. The Cut, and Vogue.

She was the 2025-2026 Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

In 2026, Farrar, Straus and Giroux acquired the North American rights to Leilani's sophomore novel, Material.

Works Novels

Short stories "Hard Water" (2016), Cosmonauts Avenue "Breathing Exercise" (2019), Yale Review "Airplane Mode" (2019). SmokeLong Quarterly