About Me

Alena is a Toronto-based queer neurodivergent writer, essayist, professor, speaker, and content creator. Her writing has focused on queer issues, coming out “later in life,” love, and people-pleasing and has appeared in numerous popular publications, such as Huffpost, Chatelaine, The Globe and Mail, Refinery29, and FASHION.

In 2024, she was long-listed for The International Amy McRae Award for Memoir and has an upcoming essay being published in The New Quarterly in Winter 2025.

She is currently writing a “coming of middle age” creative non-fiction memoir-in-essays.