• Photo by Adam Verity

      Blaise Allysen Kearsley

      Hello, it's me. I know the name looks complicated. I would like to help you with that:

      BLAISE is pronounced BLAZE. My middle name, ALLYSEN, is ALISON, but with some different letters, and KEARSLEY basically sounds like KEY-ER-Z-LEE.

       

      That's it for this first section of my website. It's getting pretty demanding already.

       

    • bio

      I'm a writer, teacher, artist, and sometime performer. I identify as Black, biracial, or person of color, and she/her.

       

      I'm the creator, producer, and host of How I Learned, a long-running, live storytelling, comedy, and reading series. I've appeared on The Moth, Risk, Mortified, The Liar Show, Literary Death Match, and at The Gotham Storytelling Festival, and various New York venues that serve booze and sometimes snacks.

       

      My writing has appeared in Longreads, VICE, Midnight Breakfast, Electric Literature's The Nervous Breakdown, Elle.com, The Boston Globe, two anthologies (Cringe and Mortified), and in several other magazines and online outlets a long time ago that are perhaps not worth mentioning by name and probably don't even exist anymore.

       

      I teach mostly creative nonfiction, and I'm currently a contributing editor at Vestal Review. I live in Brooklyn, but if you need me for something somewhere else, maybe I'll go there.

    • some writing

       

      ☉ Finding Oneself in 'Surviving the White Gaze' (The Boston Globe)

      ☉ Why Mr. Bauer Didn't Like Me (Longreads)

      ☉ The Mail Club (Midnight Breakfast)

      ☉ We Forgot About The Flowers (Midnight Breakfast)

      ☉ 3 Songs About Being Young and Disenfranchised Before The Internets (The Weeklings)

       

    • teaching

      I teach public and private workshops and mentor writers working on memoir, personal essays, and autobiographical fiction. Sometimes people say nice things about my teaching. I didn't even make these up:

      "The private workshop made me a stronger writer, and I felt more challenged than I did in other workshops. It was the hardest workshop I've ever done, but also one of the most important."

       

      "I've taken writing classes off and on for the last 20 years, all over the US, and this was the most effective by far. Blaise is a treasure."

       

      "Blaise offers a safe space for non-binary, queer, and POC to explore their writing with sensitive, constructive suggestions."

       

      "I was held accountable and had to show up for myself and others who counted on me, even when I felt like all I wanted to do was hide under my couch. Being part of this creative group of writers saved me."

       

    • the how i learned series

      Photo by Jon Boulier

       

      How I Learned was born on the Lower East Side in 2009. The series has featured Aparna Nancherla, Janelle James, Nick Flynn, Alexander Chee, Amanda Duarte, David Carr, Anna Sale, Ophira Eisenberg, Sasheer Zamata, Isaac Oliver, Eugene Mirman, Dan Kennedy, Phoebe Robinson, Choire Sicha, Rob Sheffield, Isaac Fitzgerald, and many, many, many, many others.

       

       

      "One of 5 Best Comedy Shows Hosted By Women.

      Hostess Blaise Allysen Kearsley makes sure to keep it awkwardly funny." —CBS New York

       

      "Blaise Allysen Kearsley is a charming host with an irrepressible, humming little laugh that seems to be a compromise she’s made with some wicked guffaw within." —LitWrap

       

      "...Always hilarious, sometimes touching, and without fail entertaining."

      —Brooklyn Magazine

       

      "This show has renewed my faith in this whole storytelling endeavor and what it means in the world."

      —David Crabb, The Moth

       

      "One of the best reading series the Big Apple, and possibly the world, has ever known."

      —Greg Olear, Fathermucker

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