Raven Leilani on Taking Apart the Body in Art

Miranda Barnes

“We would always go to see the body, and my mother would say ‘Ugh, she doesn’t look like herself.’”

Raven Leilani is the author of Luster, which won the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Her work has been published in Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Yale Review, Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. She completed her MFA at NYU.