Radical Poetry Reading with Holly Melgard

Poet Diana Hamilton is the author of three books: God Was Right (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Awful Truth (Golias Books), and Okay, Okay (Truck Books).

Poet Liz Howard’s debut collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was published by McClelland and Stewart in June 2021. Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She is of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario, she currently lives in Toronto.

Poet Syd Staiti is author of Seldom Approaches (forthcoming, The Elephants) and The Undying Present (Krupskaya, 2015).

Alongside Holly Melgard and Joey Yearous-Algozin, Chris Sylvester has managed and maintained Troll Thread, a tumblr-based platform for experimental texts and internet-based works, since 2011. Aside from the eighteen books published on Troll Thread, he is also the author of BOOK ABT FANTASY (Roof Books, 2016), POEMS ABT ‘INTERN’ AND ‘PHIL’ THE INTERN (Area Sneaks, 2016), MY MOM MY DAD AND ME (Gauss PDF, 2017), and Gain of Function (Hiding Press, 2021). He lives with his family in Westborough, MA.

After a decade of self-publishing on the experimental publishing platform Troll Thread, which she co-founded and co-edits, Holly Melgard has just released Fetal Position (Roof 2021), her first book with an outside publisher that was recently named by Jackie Ess as one of Artforum’s “Best Books of 2021.” She is also the author of the Poems for Baby trilogy, The Making of The Americans, Black Friday, among other works. Selected Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Inner Critic (Kenning Editions) are forthcoming. With a PhD in Poetics from SUNY Buffalo, she currently lives in Brooklyn, designing books and teaching writing at NYU and CUNY.