Preorder Negative Space here!

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Lilly Dancyger is a contributing editor at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. She's the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women's anger from Seal Press, named one of the "most recommended books of the season" by Literary Hub; and the author of Negative Space, a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the 2019 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, forthcoming in May. 

Lilly is the founder and host of Memoir Monday, a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series co-curated by Narratively, The Rumpus, Guernica, Granta, Literary Hub, and Catapult, featuring the best memoir writers of today. Her writing has been published by Longreads, The Washington Post, Glamour, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and she spends way too much time on twitter (where you can find her at @lillydancyger).

Sign up here to be notified when the Negative Space tour schedule is finalized! Review copies available through Edelweiss, here.

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Get in touch at lillydancyger at gmail dot com for inquiries about Burn It Down or Negative Space, editorial services, or speaking invitations. Do not send PR emails to this address (or at all). 

Featured Clips

Guernica Magazine •

Coming Home to Somewhere Unfamiliar

I was exuberant with the freedom I’d found, the friends I’d made, the neighborhood where I felt at home for the first time since the blurry memories of early childhood, but just under the surface was a depression that felt like panic. I felt everything, all at once. So I drank and got high so it made sense for me to laugh hysterically until tears ran down my cheeks and then sob until I was red in the face and choking. That turning point between laughter and tears was where I lived all the time, and inebriation was a convenient excuse to let it out.
Literary Hub •

Misadventures in J-School: When Grad School is the Wrong Thing

I never thought of it as compensating, I just thought of myself as someone who’d gotten her shit together after an untethered adolescence spent running around the East Village, getting drunk in Tompkins Square Park instead of learning algebra. But then I got accepted to Columbia, the stamp of institutional approval I didn’t realize I’d needed so badly, and I imagined the sweet vindication of becoming a high school drop-out with an Ivy League master’s degree.
CrimeReads •

Don’t Use My Family For Your True Crime Stories - What it's like to watch true crime as the relative of a murder victim.

This summer, my cousin Sabina would have turned 30 years old. Instead, it will mark nine years since she was murdered. Though it’s been almost a decade, I’ve just very recently started writing about her, and her death. It always felt too raw, too sacred to pull apart for story fodder—even if I’m the one doing the telling. The thought of someone who didn’t even know her using the horrible, violent way she was taken from my family as “material” is unfathomable to me. This is what I think about whe
Catapult •

How I Learned to Stop Judging And Love Insta-Witches

When I was thirteen, I discovered witchcraft. More accurately, I started paying attention to it. It had always been around me, in the silk-wrapped tarot deck on my mother’s dresser, and the sage she burned every time we moved into a new apartment. But when I was thirteen, I dove in and studied with a hunger and dedication I had never applied to anything before, and one that I never quite matched again; not even when I went to graduate school ten years later.
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