Summer Writers 2025

After a decade of self-publishing on the experimental publishing platform Troll Thread, which she designs, co-founded, and co-edits, HOLLY MELGARD’s Fetal Position (Roof) is her first book with an outside publisher. Jackie Ess named it one of Artforum’s “Best of 2021.” She has authored Poems for Baby trilogy, The Making of The Americans, and Black Friday, among other works. She has also co-authored several books with fellow co-editor Joey Yearous-Algozin, including White Trash and Liquidation (Troll Thread). Selected Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Inner Critic (Kenning Editions) are forthcoming. Having appeared in LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, her poems have been translated into Spanish, Slovenian, and German. With a PhD on “Poetics of Ubiquitization” from the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program, she currently lives in Brooklyn, freelance designs books and teaches writing at New York University and City University of New York. 

Dr. Eric Sneathen is a poet and queer literary historian living in Alameda, CA. He is the author of Don't Leave Me This Way (Nightboat Books, 2023), Minor Work (MO0ON/IO, 2021), and Snail Poems (Krupskaya, 2016). With Lauren Levin, he co-edited the selected fictions of Camille Roy, Honey Mine (Nightboat Books, 2021). He received his PhD in Creative-Critical Studies from UC Santa Cruz in 2022, and his essays, reviews, and interviews have been published by Jacket2, SF MoMA's Open Space, Poetry Foundation, and Social Text Online. With Daniel Benjamin he organized Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today and edited The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture. He has worked with a number of small presses in the San Francisco Bay Area; new titles are forthcoming from his and Noah Ross's press, SPUNK Editions.

Dr. Douglas Kearney has published eight books ranging from poetry to essays. In 2023, Optic Subwoof, a collection of his Bagley Wright lectures, won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Prize for Poetry Criticism and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. His seventh, Sho, (Wave Books) is a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner. Kearney is a Whiting Writers and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships including Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and The McKnight Foundation. He is a Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

Hazel Millar is the co-owner and co-publisher of Book*hug Press, a Canadian independent literary publisher working at the forefront of contemporary book culture. Hazel has been working in the publishing since 2009. In addition to her work with Book*hug Press, she is the Past Chair of the Board of the Literary Press Group of Canada and sits on several publishing-industry boards and advisory committees. She lives in Toronto with her husband, Jay Millar (aka the other half of Book*hug Press), their sons, and a cool, diva calico cat named Tess.