Sandy Ernest Allen is a writer and speaker whose work tends to focus on gender and on mental health. Allen has contributed to Esquire, The Believer, The Cut, The Paris Review, 99% Invisible, and This American Life, amongst others. His debut book is an innovative work of nonfiction called A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia (Scribner). The book received critical acclaim, including being nominated as a top work of the decade by NYU’s journalism school.
Allen’s work has been praised by many, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, O Magazine, The New Republic, and The Psychiatric Times. He is a graduate of Brown and has an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. He is trans and queer and lives in the Catskills. He co-founded the online-only literary quarterly Wag's Revue, which he ran for many years until its final issue in 2015. From 2013 - 2015, he was BuzzFeed News's deputy features editor.
At MacDowell, he worked on the final draft of his debut book A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia, which was published in 2018 by Scribner.
Portrait by Divine Brujeria
