My Story

Greetings.  I'm Jonathan Alexander, a writer, scholar, and educator.  Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, I now live with my husband and our cat in Southern California.  

As a writer, I work as a reviewer and cultural critic, focusing on young adult fiction, science fiction media, queer writers and culture, the politics of literacy, and memoir.  I am also a special projects editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, to which I'm a frequent contributor.  

As a scholar, I study how people write, learn about writing, and develop a sense of what writing is and does as they compose in a variety of curricular and extra-curricular contexts.  I'm particularly interested in writing that people do for personal and political projects, especially in online or multi-mediated spaces.

Most recently, I have turned attention to memoir and life writing as ways of connecting personal and political ways of thinking.  Check out my critical memoir, Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology for my experimental writing in this mode. More information about my creative nonfiction can be found at The Creep Trilogy website.

Finally, I work as Chancellor's Professor of English and Informatics at the University of California, Irvine.