Leahy's poetry and nonfiction have won citations for their “lucid and beautiful consideration of what is means at the physical level to be human and to be whole.” Her first chapbook
Hagioscope won the Sow's Ear Press Competition in 2000, and her first full-length,
Constituents of Matter won the
Wick Poetry Prize from
Kent State University in 2006. In 2016, her essays won top prizes from both
Ninth Letter and
Dogwood, and have been listed among the Notables in
The Best American Essays of 2013, 2016, and 2017. Leahy's poetry draws from concepts and terminology of science.
Constituents of Matter was reviewed favorably in ''The Women's Review of Books
among others, citing the effective use of scientific and logical systems such as game theory and the scientific method as “metaphors and models to characterize what is unseen”. Aperture'', Deborah Hauser writes, is “five tightly structured sections and a coda [which] shine a spotlight on the lives of women as diverse as the mothers left behind in
The Wizard of Oz,
Mary Todd Lincoln, Lizzie Siddal (photographer’s model), and
Katherine Johnson (NASA mathematician).” Eileen Murphy contends the "poems are varied, thoughtful, and often ironic or humorous . . . the reader looks through the mind-opening with the poet as guide, listens to unique women’s voices, revels in them, learns from them, is haunted by them." Leahy's nonfiction books include
Tumor in the
Object Lessons series from
Bloomsbury Publishing, and
Conversing with Cancer with Lisa Sparks. From 2010 to 2017, she co-authored a blog with Douglas R. Dechow,
Lofty Ambitions, about aviation and space, which culminated in a visiting fellowship at the
American Library in Paris in fall 2016 and
Generation Space: A Love Story, which follows the end of the
Space Shuttle program. In 2016, she edited and co-wrote
What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing, a collaborative exploration of teaching and academia with 32 contributors in more than a dozen conversation essays. In 2005, she edited
Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom, which was reviewed by
Pedagogy in terms of creating a new paradigm for teaching creative writing at the college and university level. The reviewer found that by examining new ways to teach as presented in Leahy's book, creative writing professors can make better decisions about their own classrooms. Her essays on teaching creative writing are included in
Hippo Reads and
The Handbook of Creative Writing, as well as critical work for
Curator,
The Journal of the Midwest MLA,
The Journal of Creative Writing Studies,
The Companion to the American Short Story, and the
Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century. A native of
Illinois, Leahy is the daughter of Mary Lee Leahy, whom the
Chicago Tribune called "a pioneering lawyer," and Andrew Leahy. She holds an MA from
Iowa State University, MFA in Poetry from the
University of Maryland, and PhD from
Ohio University. ==Work==