Leanne Grabel, M.Ed., is wearing a fake fur coat. Leanne Grabel is also a special education and language arts teacher for Portland Public Schools, a performance poet, a memoirist, illustrator, mother of two fabulous daughters, Lili and Gina, and co-founder, with her husband Steve Sander, of Cafe Lena. She has written and performed in numerous spokenword-based performance pieces, including "One Woman Shoe," "The Lighter Side of Chronic Depression," "Anger: The Musical," and most recently "badgirls," a fictional portrayal of her teaching. Among her poetry books are Lonesome and Very Quarrelsome Heroes, Flirtations, Short Poems by a Short Person, Anne Sexton Was a Sexpot and The Last Weekend of Sylvia Plath.  Grabel's memoir brontosaurus was published by Quiet Lion Press In November 2011, as was badgirls (Dancing Moon Press), a collection of prose poems. Grabel is a graduate of Stanford, PSU and Lewis & Clark.

She is currently working on a new collection of prose poems, City Cake, and an illustrated children's book, The Little Poet.