Lyzette Wanzer, MFA

 Lyzette Wanzer is a San Francisco writer, editor, and writing workshop instructor. She received her MFA in Fiction from Mills College. A flash fiction connoisseur and essay aficionado, her work has appeared in over twenty-five literary journals, magazines, books, and newspapers. Her book, Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narrative, is due out from Chicago Review Press in Fall 2022. The Independent Publishers Group has already selected the title as one of its Top-Shelf Picks for the Fall season. Lyzette is a contributor to Lyric Essay As Resistance: Truth From the Margins (Wayne State University Press 2023), Civil Liberties United: Diverse Voices from the San Francisco Bay Area (Pease Press 2019), and the multi-award-winning The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays (Wyatt-MacKenzie 2012). 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 (CEA), Desert Nights, Rising Stars (Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing), Empowering Wom[x]n of Color Conference (EWOCC), Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900, Muse & The Marketplace, San Francisco Writers Conference, and the Society for the Study of African American Life and History. She produced her own conference, Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: A Natural Hair Conference, in August 2021. Her conference offered a two-day schedule of panels, workshops, speakers, and poetry and essay readings, all examining the policing, perception, and persecution of Black women's natural hair. 

Lyzette is a member of the National Writers' Union and The Authors Guild. 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). She is the recipient of grants from Center for Cultural Innovation, San Francisco Arts Commission, California Arts Council, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Black Artist Foundry, The AwesomeFoundation, and California Humanities, a National Endowment for the Humanities partner.