Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellows in Letters

Alexandra Kleeman

Class of Fall 2025

Associate Professor of Literatures in English, Cornell University

The Taxon Cycle

At the Academy, Kleeman is working on “The Taxon Cycle,” a quasi-utopian novel written in five parts, about monetary systems on the brink of collapse and transition. Set on different islands at different times—a Micronesian island, Okinawa, Manhattan, Fårö, and a futuristic space colony—each section explores a distinct society in a moment of economic flux. In calling into question the very concepts of money and ownership, Kleeman’s novel imagines other, more communal forms of relation and exchange that stretch beyond the bounds of capitalist valuation.

Alexandra Kleeman is a novelist and associate professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Kleeman holds a dual AB in literary arts and cognitive science from Brown University, an MA in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Kleeman is the author of Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021), a New York Times Notable Book, Intimations (Harper, 2016), and a debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (HarperCollins, 2015), which won the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She has received support from the American Academy in Rome, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, as well as MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi, and Bread Loaf. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Paris Review, VOGUE, n+1, and Tin House, among others. Kleeman is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine.