Annie Liontas is the genderqueer author of the crip-queer memoir Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery (Scribner, 2024), which was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and selected as SELF Magazine’s Book of the Month. Their debut novel, Let Me Explain You (Scribner, 2015), was selected as New York Times Editors Choice in 2015. They co-edited the anthology A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors, and their work has appeared or will appear in The New York Times Book Review, Electric Literature, BOMB, Lithub, The Believer, American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s, Oprah Daily, and elsewhere.
In an interview with Emma Copley Eisenberg in Electric Literature, Annie was asked, “What is an essay to you? They responded, “I’m thinking about Alexander Chee’s quote, ‘A story is something you want to run away with, an essay is something you can’t run away from.’ I love your question, because we don’t really know what an essay is—is it an argument, is it about perspective, is it about making meaning through reflection—but Chee’s assertion really gets at something for me. I wasn’t consciously building a collection or memoir-in-essays when I first started, but I pretty quickly realized that this work had to be nonfiction. All of the stories we have of head injury are fiction (even when they’re not), because we don’t have the cultural framework to talk about them the way we do addiction or smoking.”
A graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program, Annie is an Associate Professor of writing at George Washington University and serves as faculty at the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. Annie has volunteered as a mentor for Pen City’s incarcerated writers and helped secure a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice to bring storytelling to communities in the criminal justice system. They co-host the literary podcast LitFriends and live in Philadelphia with their wife, dog, and Email the rabbit.
