about

From California, Kentucky and Texas, Alex Chand is a playwright and poet who lives in Atlanta. As a queer person of color with a disability, she writes to fully represent, empower, and center the experience of disabled and queer people of color. She’s brought her work to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and was named a finalist for the William S. Robe Playwriting Residency. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, The Offing, and The Arkansas International. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant, an alumna of Barbican Young Poets, and UniSlam UK Finalist.

Alex is also a PhD student in English at Emory University. She grounds her scholarship in postcolonial theory, the medical humanities, and disability studies. Chand seeks to situate and trace discourses of autism and cognitive difference in texts within the global context of colonization, from the emergence of eugenics in the nineteenth century to the present. Increasingly, she is also interested in the notion of a “colonial archive” and how different texts of modern and contemporary poetry which focalize racialized and non-normative bodyminds operate against it—and how we likewise might respond to these spaces using a creative lens. Chand holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Mississippi, an MA in English Literature from the University of Leeds, and a BA from Lawrence University in physics and English, where she was awarded the Diderrich Prize in Creative Writing and earned summa cum laude honors for her thesis, Charting Autistic Voices.