Alex Myers

Alex Myers was the first openly transgender student at Phillips Exeter Academy, and then at Harvard, where he pressed the college to add gender identity to its nondiscrimination policy. He read Near Eastern languages and civilizations for his first degree, added an MA in religion at Brown and an MFA in fiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and has taught English in secondary schools, Exeter among them. His first novel, Revolutionary (Simon & Schuster, 2014), follows Deborah Sampson, who served in the Continental Army disguised as a man; it reached the 2015 Lambda Literary Award shortlist in transgender fiction. Harper Voyager issued The Story of Silence in July 2020. It retells Le Roman de Silence, a thirteenth-century Old French verse romance attributed to Heldris of Cornwall, in which a king bars women from inheriting, so the Earl of Cornwall raises his daughter as a boy. The child, Silence, becomes a minstrel and then a knight, with Merlin drifting in and out of the telling. Myers also wrote Continental Divide and a guide for schools, Supporting Transgender Students.