Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir (Flatiron Books, 2017), 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 has been translated into eleven languages and is in development with HBO. Their next book, BOTH AND NEITHER (forthcoming from Doubleday), is a transgender and trans-genre look at life beyond the binary. The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Black Mountain Institute, Marzano-Lesnevich has written for The New York Times, Harper's, The Boston Globe,ELLE France, Harvard Review, and many other publications. They live in Portland, Maine, and are an assistant professor at Bowdoin College. They will use their fellowship to report on transgender issues and the self-id movement in Germany.

In their research Alex will bring the current state of self-ID laws for transgender people in Germany to the attention of an American audience. Alex will also use the fellowship to reconstruct the longer history of trans people as a cultural category and reflect on the erased history of the Magnus Hirschfield’s Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin.