jonathan leal is an arts and humanities scholar, educator, and multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA. 

Originally from the South Texas border region known as the Rio Grande Valley, Leal creates literary, musical, and integrative arts projects focused on creative resistances to the bordered world. 

Leal is the author of Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2026) and Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop (Duke University Press, 2023), which was shortlisted for the Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award, the Woody Guthrie Book Award from IASPM-US, and the Book of the Year in History, Criticism, and Culture from the Jazz Journalists Association. Additionally, Leal is also the co-editor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision (Bloomsbury, 2021) and “Exercises in Joyful Improvisational Practice,” a special issue of liquid blackness (Duke University Press, 2025). 

Leal's musical projects have been featured in Pitchfork, Democracy Now!, Texas Monthly, Remezcla, Latino USA, and elsewhere; his public writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, San Francisco Classical Voice, and elsewhere; and his interdisciplinary humanities scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, ASAP/Journal, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Rio Bravo: A Journal of the Borderlands, Journal of the Society for American Music, Jazz & Culture, American Literary History Reviews Online, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and elsewhere. From 2022–2025, he served as Associate Editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. He is currently on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, where he co-chairs the Criticism category.

A former Emerging Critic with the National Book Critics Circle and AMS-50 Fellow with the American Musicological Society, Leal earned an interdisciplinary PhD in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University in 2020 and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Southern California.