About
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. Library Journal named her book, TRAUMA, TRESSES, & TRUTH: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives, a Top 10 Best Social Sciences Book. 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 presents her work 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 and 2023 she produced her own two-day virtual conference, Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: A Natural Hair Conference, featuring 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), The Anderson Center (MN), and Santa Fe Arts Institute (NM). Montalvo Arts Center has named her a 2023-2025 Lucas Arts Fellow. 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.
Featured Work
Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narrative
From grammar and high schools to corporate boardrooms and military squadrons, Black and Afro-Latina natural hair continues to confound, transfix, and enrage members of White American society. Why, in 2021, 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?
https://shuffle.do/projects/trauma-tresses-truth-untangling-our-hair-through-personal-narrative
Other Works
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“Signatures.” Lyric Essay As Resistance: Truth from the Margins. (Wayne State University Press)
2023
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“Taking Liberties.” The Write Launch
2020
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“Yellow.” Blue Literary Magazine
2020
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“Third Eye.” Natural Bridge.
2020
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“Jaywalking.” Maryland Literary Review
2020
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“Tracks of Passage.” Midnight & Indigo
2020
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“Twisted.” Civil Liberties United: Diverse Voices from the San Francisco Bay Area. (Pease Press)
2019
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“Finding A Way In: Teaching the Lyric Essay.” Essay Daily
2018
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“The Human Development Program 2.0.” and “The UHS Presence Program.” University High School Journal. Vol. XXIV, No. 2
2018
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“Saddest Tale.” The Los Angeles Review
2017
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“’Signatures’” Five Years Later.“The Naked Truth: America’s Voice Unfiltered
2016
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“The Sudden Essay Fitness Center.” Essay Daily
2014
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“Escheresque” and “Precipice.” Journal of Advanced Development
2014
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“Seasons.” Journal of Experimental Fiction
2012
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“Signatures.” The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays. (Wyatt-MacKenzie)
2012
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“Portrait.”The Ampersand Review
2012
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“Freight.” The MacGuffin
2011
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“Grandma’s Four Stories.”Callaloo
2011
Awards and Recognition
- Impact Grant Awardee, California Arts Council. Sept 2022-Sept 2024
- Cultural Pathways Awardee, California Arts Council. Sept 2022-Aug 2023
- Black Artist Foundry. April 2022
- San Francisco Artist Grant, San Francisco Arts Commission. July 2021-Dec 2022
- Fellow, Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship, Arizona State University. February 2021
- Grantee, California Humanities, a national Endowment for the Humanities partner. January 2021
- Individual Artist Commission, San Francisco Arts Commission 2019- 2020
- Grant recipient, Center for Cultural Innovation. March 2019
- Individual Artist Commission, San Francisco Arts Commission. July 2017-Sept 2018
- Fellowship, Horned Dorset Colony Foundation. July 2014
Press and Media Mentions
- TRAUMA, TRESSES, & TRUTH lands on Library Journal's Top 10 Best Social Sciences Books of 2022
- Mechanics' Institute Member Spotlight
- Publishers Weekly names Trauma, Tresses, & Truth a Best Book for October 2022
- Library Journal puts Trauma, Tresses, & Truth on its Review Editors' Fall 2022 Reading List
- Trauma, Tresses, & Truth is abundant with important messages, historical truths, and acts of everyday heroism and defiance in the face of the worst kind of racism, the kind that refuses to recognize itself. This powerful collection is an important addition to minority studies and a necessary contribution to the process of Black women taking back their crowns. —Tara Lynn Masih, editor of the award-winning Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays (2022)
- The story of Black women’s relationship to our hair comes with many layers. It’s beautiful like a fresh set of box braids, relaxer-burn painful, and somewhere in between. Through the experiences of amazing Black women writers, Trauma, Tresses, & Truth tells the complexities of Black hair culture with authenticity and heart. Each page gives the reader an insightful blend of powerful storytelling and prose with social and historical context, all making Trauma, Tresses, & Truth another crown in the literary discourse of Black women’s hair. —Jeneé Darden, journalist and author of When a Purple Rose Blooms (2022)
- Trauma, Tresses, & Truth offers vivid vignettes of individual and collective episodic memory. There is an urgent need for collective healing that invites Black and Brown women to tell their stories from the crown down. Trauma, Tresses, & Truth seeks to unseat and decolonize our natural hair stories, redirecting entire eras of grief Into rediscovery, rebirth, and reclamation of our ability to choose our hair stories. —Dr. Afiya Mbilishaka, founder and CEO of PsychoHairapy (2022)
- With care, passion, honesty, and insightfulness, Trauma, Tresses & Truth takes readers on a beautiful journey about Black women’s hair. Each chapter in this thought-provoking and, at times, heartbreaking collection invites the reader to learn and unlearn about Blackness, white supremacy, class, and surveillance. A must-read for all invested in understanding what the ongoing subjugation of Black women looks like today. —Dr. Treva B. Lindsey, author of America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice and Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. (2022)
- The Writers Grotto carves out new paths to survive, The San Francisco Chronicle (2020)
- Lyzette Wanzer On Having A Thick Skin, SF Weekly (2016)
- And in perhaps the finest essay of the collection, Lyzette Wanzer dines at a ritzy country club and realizes that she and her waiter are the only African-Americans en scene. She suggests, in standout poetic prose, that “something is awry, off-kilter about there being only we two here, in Atlanta, just us two in a city like Atlanta, only we two here, just us two, and you serving me.” --Craig Reinbold, Assistant Editor, Terrain
- Lyzette Wanzer’s story, ‘Seasons,’ demonstrates fiction’s potency when it comes to elucidating issues of health and medical matters. Hard to resist a first sentence like ‘She wondered: How does a hospice select its wallpaper?’ --New Pages Literary Magazine Reviews
- Know what? There’s some genuinely good stuff in there [Children, Churches, and Daddies: The Unreligious, Nonfamily-Oriented Literary and Art Rag] . The voices are clean and even, emotions are honest and naked. Check out Lizette Wanzer’s “Ricochet.” These are writers worth reading, and good company for a new writer’s work. --Paul Sonntag, Reviews: Uncle Flatboot’s Porch
- It is rare to find intelligent writing about cross cultural experience, and in particular, writing which deals with the subtle complexities and pervasiveness of racism...Please keep doing this interesting work. --Roderick Clark, Editor, Rosebud
