BIO
Linda Chavers is a Black, queer, disabled writer who balances full-time employment with a sporadic writing discipline. Formerly the Assistant Dean of Harvard College and a lecturer in African American Literature at Harvard University, she now consults organizations on anti-racism and employee retention. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Boston Globe Magazine, Dame Magazine, The Rumpus, The Offing, and Gawker (RIP). Linda holds a Master of Arts in English and a PhD in African American Studies from Harvard. She is currently writing a novel about coming of age in a Black haunted house. Originally from Washington, D.C., she lives in Boston with her disobedient Westie and chatty mother, hoping to be a full-time writer one day.


Third person Bio


ARTIST STATEMENT 
I write on the body and memory pulling from personal concepts of genealogical trauma – how acute experiences can be passed from cell to cell. My unpublished novel, This Is Violence, traces the voices of three generations of Black women and the haunted house they all inhabit. Having grown up in a household filled with affection, warmth, and dark laughter as much as with shouts, screams, and punched walls I see the body as site of revolution and resistance.

I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at 24 years old, and I write on the relationship(s) between illness and identity. My chronically ill body  inspires how I create complicated, charged, and strangely peaceful prose. Because it is my body telling these stories I must be bravely – or, foolishly – open and raw about my emotions and mental processes. What finally comes out is a poetic prose that works with the space on the page and with the reader’s imagination to discuss more openly the unspeakable.

I’ve heard my work described as “a quickening” and I agree. I like to write from the more charged spaces we carry in and on our flesh. I don’t just repeat the stories I’m told but I express the experience of being told a story. My chapbook, This Fucking Body Is Never Yours (Gazing Grain Press), is a multi-layered story about reliving my girlhood as a grown woman – a girlhood marked by sexual abuse and an adulthood marked by street harassment.

My writing takes a critical view of racial and cultural issues through a personal lens. My poetic essay “To Black Girls Everywhere” (The Offing) is a quiet commentary on modern black girlhood. I write just as much on our shared American histories as I do on the I’ve grown up with resulting in all (hi)stories feeling as if they are my own on the level of the flesh. I push notions of identity and self as being fragmented pieces of larger (and much older) wholes. My work speaks from the individual body and implies that there is another observing body always present.

My essay “Storytime with Mom: a Genealogy of Rape” (Gawker) might be the origin story behind the stories I tell: a mother telling her daughter of marital rape. I use revelations of personal and shared history – oral, written and embodied – as a means to witness, read, and to better comprehend our contemporary cultures. My writing challenges the notion that there’s no such thing as monsters and suggests, instead, that there are mere humans capable of the amazing and the horrible. Where many believe in the polarity of good and evil I return to those realities of human fragility.

Artist Statement

I’m a Black, queer, disabled writer navigating the balance between full-time work and my sporadic writing practice. I was formerly the Assistant Dean of Harvard College and a lecturer in African American Literature at Harvard University. Now, I consult organizations on anti-racism and employee retention. My writing has been featured in publications like The Boston Globe Magazine, Dame Magazine, The Rumpus, The Offing, and Gawker (RIP). I hold a Master of Arts in English and a PhD in African American Studies from Harvard. Currently, I’m working on a novel about coming of age in a Black haunted house. Originally from Washington, D.C., I live in Boston with my disobedient Westie and chatty mother, and I’m hoping to become a full-time writer one day.

first person bio 

My mother is exhausting. When she comes through the door I brace myself to be loved. I prepare myself to be cared for. Her love is suffocating. I come up for air between squeezes and questions about my health and overdue library books.

Selected work