Join us on Wednesday, February 17th at 7pm as we welcome Alex Marzano-Lesnevich to the shop to celebrate the release of Both and Neither: A Memoir and History of Gender (Or, A Haunting)! More details to come, but save the date!

About the book

Author of The Fact of a Body, and winner of this year’s Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich weaves memoir and history to explore how we bear witness to trans lives, past and present.

Built on deep research and delivered with striking clarity, Marzano-Lesnevich brings into focus a fascinating cast: Joseph Lobdell, a nineteenth-century trans man confined to an asylum for loving a woman; Gerd Katter, a carpenter and early patient at Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science; Pauli Murray, the visionary whose ideas helped ignite civil rights and feminist movements; and Claude Cahun, the artist who defied gender through radical self-invention.

And, as the archive opens, the story turns inward. Marzano-Lesnevich reckons with their own desires, relationships, and becoming, where intimacy’s ecstasy and ache collide with history’s long shadow. Both and Neither fuses daring scholarship with emotional precision to reclaim a past too often erased, reimagining what it means to be seen.

About the author

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of Both and Neither: A Memoir and History of Gender (Or, A Haunting). Their first book, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, 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, an award for one book of any genre in the world. Named one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Audible, Bustle, Book Riot, The Times of London, The Guardian, Paris Match, Lire, Telerama, and The Sydney Press Herald, it was an Indie Next Pick and a Junior Library Guild selection, long-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, short-listed for the CWA Gold Dagger, a finalist for a New England Book Award and a Goodreads Choice Award, and has been translated into ten languages. The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Maine Arts Commission, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Boston Globe, Oxford American, Harper’s, and many other publications. They earned their BA at Columbia University, their JD at Harvard Law School, and their MFA at Emerson College. They are now the Rogers Communications Chair and an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

About the bookstore

The Booksmith is an independent bookstore located in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco since 1976.

Please note:

• Check-in for the event will begin at 6:45pm.
• Priced ticket holders (Book+seat, Pay it Forward!+seat) will have seats held until 7pm. Arrivals after 7pm will be allowed admission, but seats are not guaranteed.
• General admission ticket holders will be offered seats at check-in on a first-come, first-served basis. May be standing room.
• Space at the door on the day of the event is usually available, but not guaranteed.
• Books will be for sale on the night of the event.
• ADA accessible. Bathrooms on site during event hours.
• Events typically end between 8:30 and 9pm.
• Questions? tickets@booksmith.com