Alessandra Rizzotti has written for GOOD, Little Darling, Idealist, Takepart, Heeb, Smith, Hello Giggles, Reimagine, and has been featured on The White House blog for her work on the editorial series “Women Working to Do Good.” The editorial series she created for GOOD, “Push for Good,” helped raise over one million dollars for crowdfunding projects in social impact, and she helped launch impact campaigns with GOOD for Purina, GAP, Focus Features, Google, Apollo, and National MS Society. She’s also been published in three Harper Perrennial books with her six word memoirs, as well as four monologue books for Hal Leonard/Applause in collaboration with Grammy winner and GOOD member Alisha Gaddis. Her video art has been featured in Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher’s “Learning to Love You More” Gallery at the Baltic Contemporary Art Museum. In her free time, she beekeeps, volunteers with nonprofit organization Honeylove, and edits children’s chapbooks for 826 LA. At nonprofit The Trevor Project, Alessandra writes about their suicide prevention and crisis intervention programs for LGBTQ youth, helping forward their mission to save young lives.
When I found my father in 2011, 68 years old, hands shaking from Parkinson's, back hunched over, he was working in a storage unit in Massachusetts, behind a computer, checking one or two people in and out each day, like a gatekeeper. I had traveled to the town he had grown up in because I heard from his estranged sisters that they had seen him from time to time, wandering around the neighborhood on afternoon walks.