J. Vanessa Lyon

J. Vanessa Lyon is the author of the lesbian romance Meet Me in Madrid (Carina/HarperCollins, 2021), under the pen name Verity Lowell, and a campus novel, The Groves (2022), produced with a full cast as an Amazon Audible original. Her latest novel Lush Lives (2023), was one of three inaugural titles from Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic. An NBC News Best LGBTQ Book of 2023, Lush Lives received starred reviews from Booklist and Library Journal and appears on numerous recommended lists including Ms. Magazine, Electric Lit, Center for Fiction, Zibby Owens, Today Show, and Good Morning America. Lyon is a MacDowell James Baldwin Fellow and former Bread Loaf Contributor in Nonfiction. A Fulbright scholar, she holds a PhD in the history of art from UC Berkeley and teaches Art History and Visual Studies at Bennington College. Lyon’s visual studies memoir Blackness Thirteen Ways is forthcoming from Pantheon.