Genelle Chaconas

Genelle Chaconas (they/them) is a nonbinary, queer writer and visual artist, a Sacramento native now living in the Midwest. They earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from California State University, Sacramento in 2009 and an M.F.A. in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 2015. They founded and serve as head editor of the literary magazine HockSpitSlurp ("Dangerous Writing for Dangerous Minds"), currently on hiatus, and have previously read submissions for the Sacramento Poetry Center's Tule Review and hosted the Red Night Poetry series in Sacramento.

Before their first novel, Chaconas published two chapbooks: Fallout, Saints and Dirty Pictures (little m press, 2011) and Yet Wave (the Lune, 2017). Their poetry, flash fiction, and pop-culture criticism have appeared widely, in Bombay Gin, Exposition Review, The Bangalore Review, NAILED, Jet Fuel Review, Five 2 One, Moria, Grub Street, and Sonora Review, among others, alongside a steady run of horror and genre-cinema essays for Terror House and Syndicated Magazine on subjects from Hannibal to The Man in the High Castle.

Their first novel, Plague City, won JEF's 2019 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel and was published by JEF Books in 2021. A William S. Burroughs-style cut-up that reads as much like poetry as fiction, it asks the reader to fill in pieces and complete strange tests. Patchen judge Jane L. Carman called it a collage-style work that asks the reader to return, reread, and reconsider fiction and reality. Chaconas, who works in collage and assembled mixed-media as a visual artist, also designed the book's cover.

Start with Plague City, their one book on the JEF list and the 2019 Patchen winner.