Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is a 2010 recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award in Nonfiction. She will use the award to help her complete her first book, Any One of Us, a work of combined memoir and literary journalism about a Louisiana death penalty case. Her writing has also earned her fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation, as well as a work-study scholarship (“waitership”) to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Essays she wrote while developing the themes of Any One of Us appear in Bellingham Review (as the winner of the 2009 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction) and Fourth Genre. Her prose, both fiction and nonfiction, also appears inThe New York Times, TriQuarterly Online, Southeast Review, Bookslut, The Smart Set, Connecticut Review, and elsewhere.

Alexandria earned her JD at Harvard Law School, where she focused on death penalty issues. She also holds a BA in Sociology from Columbia University and an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Emerson College.

Currently, Alexandria lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. She is a creative writing instructor and manuscript consultant at Boston’s Grub Street and the Nonfiction Editor of Identity Theory. In January 2012, she will begin teaching creative nonfiction at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA.

To contact Alexandria, please e-mail her at alexandriaml@gmail.com.

Photo by Caleb Cole
© 2010 Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich