Lila Bonow is a Black, multiracial, writer, artist, and teacher from a counterculture family in Seattle, Washington. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh.

As a teacher, Lila Bonow has focused on mentoring writers of color (working with The Colorization Collective), the art of honoring and honing personal style (teaching Seminar in Composition for the University of Pittsburgh), and teaching the history and resistance of Black Americans and African diasporic people in the United States, rooted especially in the history of Pittsburgh’s Black communities (The University of Pittsburgh’s Anti-Black Racism: History, Ideology, and Resistance course).

She has served as a fiction editor for Aster(ix): A Feminist Literary Journal and is a senior editor for 3 Sisters Literary Journal.