Clarissa de Leon is a teacher, researcher, and writer. She is currently completing her PhD at Queen’s University where she researches anti-racist pedagogies, higher education, and BIPoC communities of practice. She was awarded the 2019 English Thesis Master's Research Award by the Language and Literacy Researchers of Canada for her thesis "'A Calm Arises': An anxious adolescent's experience of building self-compassion through aesthetic reading."
Her writing has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review and Key Concepts in Curriculum Studies: Perspectives on the Fundamentals. Clarissa lives in Kingston, Ontario, with her greyhound, Emilio.