Leaven

As the biggest project of her life comes online, a neuroscientist watches the world go dark and struggles to understand what's risen on the other side. Leaven is a novel about bread, intelligence, and what it means to be alive. T. Ryan Day is a Madrid-based writer and professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Saint Louis University's campus in Spain. He was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and raised in Chicago after spending years of his childhood in Colorado, Texas, and Georgia. He has taught at universities in the United States, China, France, and Spain. He is the author of five books: the novels Leaven (2026), Outside Athens (2024), and Big Sky (2020); the poetry collection Green &; Grey (2019); and the scholarly work Shakespeare and the Evolution of the Human Umwelt (Routledge, 2021). His fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in academic, literary, and popular publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He was an early and longtime contributor to the creative nonfiction magazine The Nervous Breakdown.