Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

The Fact of a Body has been translated into 11 languages and serves as the cornerstone of a semester-long university class in France covering discussions of gender, sexuality, reckoning with sexual assault, and criminal justice. It is now being adapted for television by Public Record and HBO. Following the publication of The Fact of a Body, Alex has written extensively on transgender rights, including a viral New York Times op-ed, and has appeared on public radio programs like “Marketplace” and “The Takeaway.” Their Harper’s essay “Body Language,” about identifying as genderqueer, was anthologized in The Best American Essays 2020 and has been taught widely at universities, including Harvard, where Alex gave the 2020 Pride Week Public Lecture.

A graduate of Harvard Law School and former faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Alex has given talks on social and criminal justice across a wide array of venues domestic and international, literary and beyond, including an NGO addressing public policy education in Phnom Penh; the HM Prison Thameside in London, where inmate discussion groups read their book; and as the co-emcee of the closing ceremony of the 7^th World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Brussels.

Alex’s writing and reporting has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Civitella Ranieri in Italy, the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Germany, Dora Maar in France, the Eccles Centre at the British Library, MacDowell, and many other organizations. Their essays and journalism appear in The New York Times, Harper’s, Agni, and Elle France.

Alex’s next book, Both and Neither, a transgender, trans-genre, and transnational inquiry into life beyond the binary, is forthcoming from Doubleday and publishers internationally.