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About Lyzette

Lyzette Wanzer is a San Francisco writer, editor, and writing workshop instructor. Her work appears in over twenty-five literary journals, magazines, books, and newspapers Her book, TRAUMA, TRESSES, & TRUTH: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives (Chicago Review Press) has been named an October 2022 Publishers Weekly Best Book, and appears on Library Journal’s 2022 Top 10 Best Social Sciences Books list. Her articles have appeared in Essay Daily, The Naked Truth, and the San Francisco University High School Journal. Her research interests include professional development for creative writers, Black feminism, critical race theory, and the lyrical essay form. Lyzette serves as judge of the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition’s Intercultural Essay category and the Women’s National Book Association’s Effie Lee Morris Writing Contest’s Fiction category. She presented her work on panels at conferences across the country, including the American and Popular Culture Association, Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), College English Association, Desert Nights, Rising Stars (Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing), Empowering Wom[x]n of Color Conference, Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900, Grub Street’s Muse & The Marketplace, San Francisco Writers Conference, The Society for the Study of African American Life and History, and Southern Humanities Council. In August 2021 she produced her own two-day virtual conference, Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: A Natural Hair Conference, panels, workshops, and readings examining the policing, perception, politics, and persecution of Black women’s natural hair. A National Writers’ Union and Authors Guild member, Lyzette has been awarded writing residencies at Blue Mountain Center (NY), Kimmel Harding Center for the Arts (NE), Playa Summer Lake (OR), Horned Dorset Colony (NY), Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow (AR), Headlands Center for the Arts (CA), The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada, PlySpace (IN), and The Anderson Center (MN). Her work has been supported with grants from Center for Cultural Innovation, San Francisco Arts Commission, California Arts Council, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Black Artist Foundry, The Awesome Foundation, and California Humanities, a National Endowment for the Humanities partner.