(Marzano-Lesnevich, Alexandria) Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, she has received a Rona Jaffe Award and has twice been a fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo. Her essays appear in the New York Times, Oxford American, and the anthologies True Crime and Waveform: Twenty-First Century Essays by Women, as well as many other publications. She received her JD from Harvard, her MFA at Emerson College, and her BA from Columbia University. She teaches at Grub Street and in the graduate public policy program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir (Flatiron Books) is her latest book. Before Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich begins a summer job at a law firm in Louisiana, working to help defend men accused of murder, she thinks her position is clear. The child of two lawyers, she is staunchly anti-death penalty. But the moment convicted murderer Ricky Langley’s face flashes on the screen as she reviews old tapes, she is overcome with the feeling of wanting him to die. Despite their vastly different circumstances, something in his story is unsettlingly, uncannily familiar. An intellectual and emotional thriller that is also a different kind of murder mystery, The Fact of a Body is a book not only about how the story of one crime was constructed — but about how we grapple with our own personal histories.
