Lyzette Wanzer, MFA

Author & Creative Writing Instructor

About Lyzette

At the AWP 2019 conference. Click photo to reach our panelist page

At AWP 2019. Click pic to see our panel!

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.

Introducing the 2023 Plan to Be Professional series for creative writers

All Plan to Be Professional workshops meet at Intersection for the Arts at 1446 Market Street in San Francisco (Van Ness Avenue BART and MUNI). Note that these are not online workshops.

You may register for one or multiple worrkshops in the series. If you register for three or more classes, you receive a 10% discount on the combined price of the number of workshops you're taking. Registration for all workshops except for Preparing for the 2023 Literary Grants Application Season closes February 4th. Registration for the by-admission-only grants seminar closes March 31st. Visit the Workshops menu for more information.

Organizations

Association for the Study of African American Life and History

Association of Writers & Writing Programs

The Authors' Guild

Modern Language Association

National Writers Union

Popular Culture Association

Call for Submissions extended!

TRAUMA, TRESSES, & TRUTH: A Natural Hair Conference is a three-day virtual conference examining the politics, policing, and perception of African American and Afro Latina women's natural hair in American society. You may see the program from the inaugural 2021 conference at https://trauma-tresses-truth-untangling-our-hair-thro.heysummit.com. The 2023 conference will occur August 4, 5, and 6.

This virtual conference gathers papers, creative nonfiction essays, and artworks that contribute to a conversation about this fact: For four hundred years, Black natural hair has been the target of erasure efforts, demarginalizing us as African Americans, Afro Latinas, and as women. The various institutional modalities of policing Black women's (and men's) hair is a form of racist politics. This conference aims to situate the fact that, despite structural denials to the contrary, our natural hair remains a heretical war zone. Policing of both Black bodies and our natural hair is a form of structural oppression. In her essay "Is Your Hair Still Political?" Audre Lorde explains how an immigration officer's objections to her dreadlocks nearly cost her a vacation in the British Virgin Islands. Natural hair, whether in the form of braids, afros, dreadlocks, or other natural styles, has always been political. Why is this still the case? Why have we not moved beyond that perennial racist emblem? And why are women so disproportionately affected? Why does our hair become most palatable when it capitulates—and has been subjugated— to resemble Caucasian features as closely as possible? Who in our society gets to author the prevailing constitution of professional appearance? How do we, as Black women (and Black men as well) encourage course correction and alter the prism through which our hair is interrogated?