Hasanthika Sirisena

I was born in Sri Lanka and immigrated to America when I was still too young to understand what was happening. My first memory of America—not so surprising—is looking up at the McDonald’s ‘Golden Arches’ and standing in a bookstore staring at the cover of the Wizard of Oz.

Before becoming a writer, I trained as a visual artist and have among my degrees a BFA in studio art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I teach nonfiction and have a particular interest in the personal essay, the lyric essay and the video essay. I am particularly drawn to—given that I’m technically Generation X—in a post-punk aesthetic and love Raymond Pettibon, Black Flag and the Sonic Youth. In the mid ’90s, I moved to New York City and fundraised for a number of arts institutions including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, where I worked on my short story collection while pretending to write grants.

I enjoy reading a wide range of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. My most recent find is Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, which I am still trying to wrap my head around. My favorite bookstore in the world is the Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg with the Strand Bookstore in New York City running a close second.

MFA, CUNY City College of New York

MA, New York University

BA, Univ of North Carolina Chapel Hill

BFA, School of Art Institute of Chicago

Hasanthika Sirisena’s essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Georgia Review, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review Online, WSQ, anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017) and named a notable essay by Best American Essays in 2022. Professor Sirisena is currently a prose editor at Tupelo Press and teaches fiction and nonfiction for the MFA program in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. They are the author of the short story collection The Other One (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). Their essay collection Dark Tourist (Ohio State University/Mad Creek Press, 2021) won the Gournay Prize and was short listed for a Lambda Literary award.