BIOGRAPHY FELLOW 2013 – 2014

Alexandra Chasin

For a biography of Harry J. Anslinger

Alexandra Chasin is Assistant Professor of Writing at Eugene Lang College, The New School, having earned a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford and an MFA at Vermont College. She is the author of a nonfiction work, Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market, as well as two books of fiction: a collection of short innovative fictions entitled Kissed By, and Brief, an ‘app’ novella for the iPad. Chasin is a past recipient of a Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, a Bunting Institute Fellowship, and a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. As a Leon Levy fellow she worked on a biography of Harry J. Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Her book Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger’s War on Drugs was published in October 2016 by the University of Chicago Press.