Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
“I write that my work may bring about its own obsolescence. I am interested in what narratives we tell about ourselves on societal and familial levels, and in how to construct a narrative that interrogates and troubles the power dynamics of its own telling.”
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices Elle, the Prix des Libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD. It was translated into 10 languages and was named to “best of the year” lists on three continents. Their essays appear in The Best American Essays 2020 and 2022 editions, as well as Harper’s, The New York Times, The Yale Review, Agni, Elle France, and many other publications.
A Harvard JD and Emerson MFA, Marzano-Lesnevich is former faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Chan School of Public Health, and a former assistant professor at Bowdoin College in Maine. They now live in Vancouver, Canada, where they are an assistant professor and the Rogers Communications Chair in Creative Nonfiction at the University of British Columbia. Their next book, which received both a Creative Capital Award and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction grant, is Both and Neither: A Memoir and a History of Gender (Or, a Haunting), forthcoming in February 2027 from Doubleday and publishers internationally.
“The superb writing and story-telling keep luring you back. Marzano-Lesnevich writes with a beautifully deft one-two-three punch of grace, power and raw emotion.”