Alexandra Chasin received her PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University in 1993, and went on to teach literary and cultural studies (with special interests in gender, sex and sexuality, race, and popular culture) at Boston College, Yale University, the University of Geneva, and Columbia University. Chasin's first book was a work of nonfiction called Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market (St. Martin's, 2000), which argued that the identification of gays and lesbians as a target market in the 1990s pulled the gay and lesbian social movement away from radical political goals of sexual liberation and subversion of traditional gender roles and toward more centrist goals like open inclusion in the military and access to marriage. Extracts from Selling Out were published in Cultural Critique and in Rethinking Commodification, eds. Martha M. Ertman and Joan C. Williams (NYU, 2005). Also in the scholarly vein, her article "Class and its Close Relations: Identity Among Women, Servants, and Machines," was published in Posthuman Bodies, eds. Ira Livingston and Judith Halberstam (Indiana, 1995).

In 2002, Chasin completed an MFA in Fiction Writing at Vermont College. Kissed By is her first book of fiction. Chasin's creative work has been published in print in Denver Quarterly, AGNI, Chain, sleepingfish, West Branch, Phoebe, and The Capilano Review, and online in Exquisite Corpse, DIAGRAM, and elimae. Chasin's fiction is driven by a preoccupation with language, ideas, politics, formal problems, and a desire to engage readers in serious - and playful - interaction with her texts.

A past recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe and a Whiting Fellowship, Chasin is still in recovery from scholarship. She now teaches in the Writing Department at Lang College, The New School.