Leah Mensch is an Iraqi-American writer based in Tucson, Arizona, where they’re working on a book length archival project about the late poet Kate Braverman and their immigrant family. You can find them on the bus thinking about ratatouille—the food, not the film—and you can find their essays published or forthcoming in Guernica, Hotel Amerika, and The North American Review, where they were a finalist for the 2023 Terry Tempest Williams Nonfiction Prize.