UBC’s School of Creative Writing is pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is a 2025 recipient of the $40,000 USD Whiting Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress for their forthcoming book Both and Neither.
Awarded by the Whiting Foundation in the United States, the grant is given annually to 10 writers completing ambitious and deeply researched books. The foundation supports the grantees through funding for research and composition, as well as publicity guidance and career development.
Both and Neither is a work of memoir and haunted nonfiction about life beyond the binary.
Because genre and gender come from the same root, Marzano-Lesnevich has chosen a trans-genre approach to write a transgender story. Through memoir, they ask how we see, or fail to see, ourselves and others. Alongside memoir, they utilize an archival thread to reinvestigate the stories of four historical figures, stories that were once invisible to them, deriving a transmasculine lineage from those who transed, or traversed, gender in the same places that Marzano-Lesnevich once inhabited. In Both and Neither, Marzano-Lesnevich asks how to make a life in a culture that would deny, suppress, and harm trans people. To ask to be seen is to ask how to be loved is to ask how to live—answers to which can only be found in community, across time.
“I have long admired the work funded by the Whiting Foundation and the work of the Foundation itself and feel honored to now be among the recipients—particularly for this book at this moment in the United States’s political climate,” says Marzano-Lesnevich. “Evoking the past is part of how we speak back against suppression and erasure and create a truer and more inclusive future.”
The judges state: “Powerfully and beautifully crafted, Both and Neither blends memoir and history with rare sensitivity, bringing to life trans experiences—past and present—with grace, intellect, and honesty. Marzano-Lesnevich illuminates a history long obscured while reminding us that no one walks their path alone.”
Both and Neither will be published by Doubleday (North America), Phoenix (UK), and Sonatine (France) in 2027.
