Andrea Actis was born in Toronto but for most of her life has lived in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ Nations. Her mother is Hungarian, from Romania, and her father was Italian and English.

Andrea studied literature and humanities at Simon Fraser University, where she completed an Honours thesis using the feminist existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir to examine the work of the poet Phyllis Webb. When she began her PhD at Brown University in 2007, her plan had been to write about neo-avant-garde poetry and poetics through the lenses of ethical ambiguity and queer failure. This eventually turned into a dissertation on competing definitions, invocations, and performances of seriousness and the deconstruction of whiteness in the space of contemporary literature and discourse more broadly.

Since finishing her PhD in 2017, Andrea has taught writing and literature at Capilano University. Before that, in an interlude during which she almost dropped out of grad school to run a memorial-planning business, Andrea edited The Capilano Review, overseeing the magazine’s departure from Capilano University in 2015 and an active two years of its community arts programming.

Andrea’s first book, Grey All Over (Brick Books, 2021), is an autoconceptual study of traumatic grief and anomalous experience. She is currently at work on two new books, both of which are at least a little bit about whatever UFOs are.

With Trevor Shikaze, Andrea operates the small press and research entity WAWI (What Are We In?).