Da'Shaun L. Harrison

Da’Shaun Harrison is a queer and trans afropessimist and anarcho-communist born and bred in the South. They are the author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and received several other media and literary honors. As a movement media and narrative strategist, Harrison draws from a deep history of community organizing—beginning in 2014 during their first year at Morehouse College—to inform their cultural criticism and political thought.

Through the lens of what Harrison terms “Black Fat Studies,” they lecture widely on the intersections of blackness, fatness, and gender. Harrison currently serves as Co-Executive Director of Scalawag Magazine, where they were previously the magazine’s first Editor-at-Large. They are also a co-founder of the Movement Media Alliance (MMA), which houses projects such as Media Against Apartheid & Displacement (MAAD), Communities Beyond Elections (CBE), and other collaborative media efforts.

In addition to their editorial and organizing work, Harrison served on the Board of Directors for the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) from 2023-2026. They also co-host the podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back and are ⅓ of the video podcast In The Middle. Between 2019 and 2021, Harrison served as Associate Editor—and later Managing Editor—of Wear Your Voice Magazine. Their work remains grounded in abolitionist practice and destructive media.

As a speaker, Harrison has delivered keynotes and guest lectures at universities and colleges such as Harvard Law School, Yale University, Northwestern University, Spelman College, University of Cincinnati, Trinity College, and more. Their research and writing has appeared in anthologies and other texts, including Black Love Matters (2022), In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities (2022), and The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies (2023). As a public intellectual, Harrison’s work is regularly in conversation with thinkers such as Sabrina Strings, Kiese Laymon, Joy James, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Hortense Spillers, C. Riley Snorton, Jamil al-Amin and others on the topics of (anti-)fatness, (trans)gender and sexuality, Black Feminism, Afropessimism, and Socialist thought, to name a few.

Harrison’s writing has appeared in PhiladelphiaPrint, Scalawag Magazine, Wear Your Voice, THEM, Black Youth Project, BET, Prism, and elsewhere. They have also been featured in/interviewed by Black Power Media, The Takeaway, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times, The ACLU, The Fader, Teen Vogue, the New York Times, and a host of other podcasts and digital media platforms.

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