EventsThe New Social Environment#1153

Publishing-in-Transit: Book*hug Press

Featuring Stephen Cain, Jay Millar, Liz Worth, and Cole Swensen

Wednesday, January 29, 2025 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

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Author Stephen Cain, Book*hug Press Co-Publisher Jay Millar, and poet Liz Worth join Rail contributor Cole Swensen for a conversation.

Stephen Cain

A photo of Stephen Cain on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment

Photo by Sharon Harris

Stephen Cain is the author of six full-length collections of poetry and a dozen chapbooks, including False Friends, I Can Say Interpellation, Zoom, Etc PhrasesAmerican Standard/ Canada Dry, Torontology, and dyslexicon. His academic publications include The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages (co-written with Tim Conley) and a critical edition of bpNichol’s early long poems: bp: beginnings. He lives in Toronto where he teaches avant-garde and Canadian literature at York University.

    Jay Millar

    A photo of Jay Millar on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment

    Jay Millar is the co-owner and co-publisher of Book*hug Press, an award-winning Toronto-based independent literary publishing house working at the forefront of contemporary book culture. Jay is also an author and has published seven collections of poetry, the most recent of which is I Could Have Pretended to be Better than You: New and Selected Poems.

      Liz Worth

      A photo of Liz Worth on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment

      Photo by Lisa East

      Liz Worth is a poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer. She is a two-time nominee for the ReLit Award for Poetry for her books The Truth Is Told Better This Way and No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol. Her first book, Treat Me Like Dirt, was the first of its kind to provide an in-depth history of Southern Ontario’s first wave punk movement. Her other works also include Amphetamine Heart, PostApoc, and The Mouth is a Coven. Her writing has appeared in Chatelaine, FLARE, Prism, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and Broken Pencil, among others. Liz is a professional tarot reader and
      lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

      Cole Swensen

      A photo of Cole Swensen on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
      Photo by Anthony Hayward

      Cole Swensen is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2024 ALTA National Translation Award and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Award.

        We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨

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