[4] Banias was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Chicago.
[5] He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College and a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from Hunter College.
[7] Banias has received the fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Stanford University.
[citation needed] He is an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco.
[8] In 2022, he was the winner of the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature for A Symmetry.