Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

Writer, USA

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 Prix des libraires du Quebec, the Grand Prix des Lectrices Elle, and the Prix France Inter-JDD. It was translated into eleven languages and is in development with HBO. The recipient of fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the Eccles Centre at the British Library, and the National Endowment for the Arts, their work appears in The New York Times, Harper’s, and Elle France, and has twice been selected for THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS. Their second book, Both and Neither, is forthcoming.

Both and Neither

Both and Neither is a genre-and-gender-bending blend of memoir, history, cultural analysis, trans reimagining, and international road trip about life beyond the binary. As the words genre and gender come from the same root, Marzano-Lesnevich has chosen a trans-genre approach to write a transgender story. The threads interweave in essayistic fashion as they visit archives and locales to research different experiences of gender. As the book progresses, characters from the historical past come to imaginative life to join them in the present, and they create a queer structure and genre to write themself a community across time.