American
Alice Bolin is an American essayist and critic. She grew up in Moscow, Idaho, an experience she wove into her debut essay collection, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession (William Morrow, 2018), a New York Times Notable Book and Edgar Award nominee for Best Critical/Biographical Work that examined true crime, the American West, and pop culture's fixation on murdered women. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and published a poetry chapbook, Motel Diary (Poor Claudia, 2014), before Dead Girls. Her second essay collection, Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse (Mariner Books, 2025), turns her cultural criticism toward feminism, internet culture, cults, and corporate mythmaking. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Cut. She is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of Memphis.