Chris Belcher

Hi, I’m Chris. I am a writer and educator based in Los Angeles, California. Fifteen years ago, in pursuit of a PhD in Literature, I made the journey from my hometown in West Virginia to the Golden State. Culturally speaking, Los Angeles and West Virginia couldn’t have been more different. The place where I grew up is very rural. Like, no stoplights rural. Like, you could see a McDonald’s off in the distance, but the Ohio River stood between you and a Big Mac rural. I came of age and came out as gay in that small Appalachian town, and wrote about that experience in my debut memoir, PRETTY BABY, which I published with Simon & Schuster / Avid Reader Press in 2022. Over the past year, I have been hard at work on an adaptation of this story for television.

I acclimated to the big city just fine and have spent the last fifteen years teaching at the University of Southern California and helping to make community spaces for queer women. My favorite writer is Dorothy Allison (1949 – 2024), whose work, like mine, took up class struggle, labor, the American South, feminism and lesbian community.

As a professor, I teach creative nonfiction to undergraduate writers at USC. I also teach classes on LGBTQ issues and politics, supervise PhD candidates who are building their own teaching careers, and work one-on-one with graduate student poets, novelists, and scholars on their research and writing projects. I completed my PhD in 2016, and my dissertation focused on representations of rural life in American literature, television, film, and photography, from the early twentieth century to the present. I also teach creative nonfiction in the Antioch University Creative Writing MFA program, where I have consulted on the book projects of emerging memoirists and essayists.

As a story consultant and editor, I have helped bring dozens of stories to readers who needed them. The project of which I’m most proud is the collection of personal narrative essays that I edited for the Feminist Press in 2021, WE TOO: Essays on Sex Work and Survival. As a book coach, I have helped writers navigate the literary publishing world, from getting bylines to finding an agent, writing a book proposal to navigating the post-publication blues.

My ghostwriting project—ARCHIVE OF THE HEART—grew out of a desire to help more people bring their stories into the world. Coming out of the pandemic, I was as lost as anyone. And like many Angelenos do when we are lost, I hired a witch—an oracle—to help me find my way. The witch told me that I needed to help people tell their stories, not only in my classrooms, but in a more intimate way. It took me a while to figure out what she meant, but once I did, I fell in love with writing and storytelling in a whole new way. Check out my ARCHIVE OF THE HEART page to learn more about my ghostwriting services.

Now, I live in Los Angeles with my partner, Hope, and our rescue pup, Margo. The three of us foster other dogs who are looking for their forever homes.