Vanessa Carlisle earned her BA in psychology at Reed College, an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, and currently writes fiction and critical work in the PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing program at USC. She works collaboratively within and outside the university, and draws from critical pedagogy, critical race theory, anticapitalist theories of social/political formations, and queer and gender studies to co-create decolonizing, historicizing, materially embedded and community-centered scholarship. Her scholarly projects engage the motley archives of "sub" cultural groups such as sex workers, anarchist collectives, drug users, prison abolitionists, queer performers, and political activists, and her creative work seeks to render exquisitely evocative characters pushing the boundaries of the possible.

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