Alexandra Chasin

Alexandra Chasin is Professor of Literary Studies at Lang College, The New School. Chasin writes across genres and media, working at the juncture of progressive politics, experimental poetics, and the meta/phenomenal world.

Chasin's most recent book is Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger's War on Drugs. Assassin is an intergenre and interdisciplinary cultural history of the origins of the war on drugs in the U.S. (U Chicago P, 2016). Her previous nonfiction book is Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market, a study of the effects of target marketing on the LGBT social movement (St. Martin’s, 2000). Book-length fictional works are Brief, a novella about an art vandal, first released as an app (Jaded Ibis Productions), and Kissed By, a collection of innovative short fictions (FC2).

Chasin was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. In 2018, Chasin began a two-year residency in the Live Feed program at New York Live Arts for the development and production of a play, Fragments, Lists, & Lacunae (with Zishan Ugurlu). She is also the past recipient of fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and fellowships from the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Whiting Foundation.

Chasin was the founder and Artistic Director of Writing On It All (2013-17), a public-participatory writing project. Artists, writers, and activists facilitated sessions in which the public was invited to write on the interior surfaces of out-of-use houses on Governors Island in New York Harbor.