| Jonathan Alexander | |
| Birth Date: | 2 October 1967 |
| Birth Place: | New Orleans, Louisiana |
| Occupation: | Academic, Cultural Critic, Editor, and Memoirist |
| Citizenship: | American |
| Education: | Ph.D., Comparative Literature |
| Alma Mater: | Louisiana State University |
| Subject: | Writing Studies & Rhetoric, New Media Studies & Digital Rhetoric, Genre and Popular Fiction, Life Writing, Sexuality Studies |
| Years Active: | 1990-present |
Jonathan Alexander (born October 2, 1967) is an American rhetorician and memoirist. He is Chancellor's Professor of English, Informatics, Education, and Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine.[1] His scholarly and creative work is situated at the intersections of digital culture, sexuality, and composition studies.[2] For his work in cultural journalism and memoir, Tom Lutz, founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, has called him "one of our finest essayists."[3]
Alexander received his BA in English and an MA and PhD in Comparative Literature (1993) from Louisiana State University. He studied with James Olney, who was the Voorhies Professor of English and an editor of The Southern Review.
Alexander has worked primarily as an academic, scholar, higher educator, and administrator, with a current appointment at UC, Irvine.[4] He also works across media. He is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, where he serves as Young Adult Fiction section editor and the host of the video series, "Writing Sex."[5] At UCI he is co-host of the podcast series "We Are UCI: Redefining Student Success for the 21st Century."[6] In 2019, he co-organized a poetry and art exhibit with artist Antoinette LaFarge called "Burning Time," an imagined memory project about Alexander's now deceased gay uncle, in which Alexander and LaFarge attempted to imagine and depict his possible mid-20th century life in New Orleans' French Quarter.[7]
More recently, Alexander has turned his attention to writing creative nonfiction, publishing a series of memoirs. Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot was published by Fordham University Press in 2021 and details the author's experience of a minor stroke and how he understands the stroke's relationship to the long-term experience of homophobia.[8] Another set of books, loosely called "The Creep Trilogy," uses formal experimentation to document Alexander's experience of homophobia as a kid in the Deep South and his struggle to come to grips with self-hatred. Recounting a similar set of stories in overlapping fashion, the retelling plays out different perspectives on his personal history and Alexander's attempts to come to terms over time with his past. The books include Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology (2017), Bullied: The Story of an Abuse (2021), and Dear Queer Self (2022).[9] Writing specifically about Bullied, author Julietta Singh offers a comment that could reflect much of Alexander's creative nonfiction project: "Expanding the cultural frame of what constitutes sexual abuse, he ruminates over the enduring psychic and bodily effects of homophobia. In so doing, this gorgeous book seeks to redress some of the ways we have used each other in the service of making marginalized life more livable, and ultimately redirects our energy toward the transformation of a world that continues to punish our differences."[10]
His books have been nominated for various awards, including the Lambda Literary Award and the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. His book, On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies won both the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Outstanding Book Award and the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. In 2012, Bisexuality and Queer Theory was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Literature. Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Subject won the 2015 Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship. Alexander is a three-time recipient of the Ellen Nold Award for Best Article in the field of Computers and Composition Studies.[11] In 2011, he was given the Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Computers and Writing.[12] In 2018, his memoir Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Bullied: The Story of an Abuse was the recipient of a 2022 "Ippy" Gold Medal, awarded by the Independent Publisher Book Awards.[13] In 2023, he was given the CCCC's Co-Exemplar Award for "representing the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession."[14] He also won the CCCC's 2023 Lavender Rhetorics Award for "Nontraditional Scholarly Text Award: Jonathan Alexander, Creep Trilogy, WRITING SEX, and Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot."[15]