Alex Gino

About Alex Gino

Alex Gino was born October 1, 1977, in Staten Island, New York. Gino is genderqueer, uses they/them pronouns, and is addressed with the honorific Mx. They began writing what would become their debut novel in 2003, drawing directly on their own experience to portray a transgender child's inner life with unusual specificity for a middle-grade audience. Gino has lived in cities across the country, including Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Northampton, and Oakland, and spent a period living in an RV while traveling.

Notable Works

Gino's debut, originally published in 2015 as George and renamed Melissa in 2021 to match its protagonist's chosen name, follows a fourth grader who is seen by everyone around her as a boy but knows herself to be a girl, and who uses a school production of Charlotte's Web to begin asserting who she really is. The novel won the Stonewall Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award. Gino followed it with You Don't Know Everything, Jilly P! (2018), centered on Deaf culture, Rick (2020), which explores asexuality, and Alice Austen Lived Here (2022), about a nonbinary Staten Island teenager researching the queer history of real-life photographer Alice Austen for a statue design contest.

One of the Most Challenged Authors in America

Melissa topped the American Library Association's list of most-challenged books in 2018, 2019, and 2020, and ranks among the ten most banned books of the 2010s — almost entirely because its transgender protagonist is itself treated as the objectionable content, regardless of how the story handles it. Alice Austen Lived Here has drawn similar objections over its nonbinary protagonist and its matter-of-fact depiction of a same-sex relationship in the historical record it explores. Across Gino's catalog, this site records challenges spanning 7 states and 28 districts, reflecting a broader pattern in which books centering transgender and nonbinary characters face disproportionate scrutiny in schools.