Alexandra Chasin writes across genres and media, working at the juncture of progressive politics, experimental poetics, and the meta/phenomenal world.

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Chasin's most recent book is Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger's War on Drugs. Assassin is an intergenre and interdisciplinary cultural history of the origins of the war on drugs in the U.S. (U Chicago P, 2016). Her previous nonfiction book is Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market, a study of the effects of target marketing on the LGBT social movement (St. Martin’s). Book-length fictional works are Brief, a novella about an art vandal, first released as an app (Jaded Ibis Productions), and Kissed By, a collection of innovative short fictions (FC2).

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Chasin was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. From 2018 to 2020 she was a Live Feed Creative Resident at New York Live Arts with director Zishan Ugurlu. Their full-length performance, Fragments, Lists, & Lacunae, featured Judith Butler and was produced by Live Arts in 2020. She is also the past recipient of fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and fellowships at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Radcliffe Institute.

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Chasin was the founder and Artistic Director of Writing On It All, a participatory project in which artists, writers, and activists facilitated sessions in which the public was invited to write on the interior surfaces of out-of-use houses on Governors Island in New York Harbor. Writing On It All ran dozens of such sessions from 2013 to 2017.

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Chasin is currently the Mellon Chair in Humanities at the Bard Prison Initiative. She lives, teaches, and writes in New York.