Megan Milks
“Why am I obsessed with these adolescent genres? Honestly, they are just so deeply ingrained in my DNA as a reader and writer, and are an important part of my canon of formative texts. But there’s something about gender and sexuality here, too, because so many of these texts imagine as their reader a cisgender, heterosexual girl who is most likely white and middle class. I was and was not that girl.”
“Megan Milks is the most interesting prose writer working today. There! I said it. Milks smashes fiction and glues the shards back together. Milks destroys boredom! Milks stans fanfic, retells the New Narrative, lights a million candles at the altar of queer and trans experimental literature, sends love letters to Kathy Acker and Samuel R. Delany and Ovid, hate-reads Sweet Valley High in the sexiest and most disturbing ways. You will never look at Tegan and Sara—or slugs, or tomatoes—in the same way again. Be careful: this collection is a virus that will permanently change the way you read. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Unapologetically bold and insightful.”
“This collection is a testament to Milks’ wild, queer, and wonderfully weird imagination.”
“Lambda-nominated Megan Milks has knocked this coming-of-age meditation out of the park, blending magical realism with tween nostalgia and teen angst, resulting in a totally accurate-feeling account of the chaos of growing up.”
“Girl detectives, adolescent angst, all soundtracked to Fiona Apple—Milks’s first novel is a mid-‘90s marvel, one that acutely captures the surreal Tidal-wave of teenage emotions and the “private heat” of girlhood.”
Megan Milks is the the author of the novel Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body (Feminist Press, 2021), praised by Publisher’s Weekly as “emotionally complex and illuminating,” and a finalist for 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction. They are also the author of Slug and Other Stories (Feminist Press, 2021), which Kirkus Reviews, in a starred review, called “tender little stories that will make you gasp and squirm.” Tori Amos Bootleg Webring (Instar Books, 2021), We Are the Baby-Sitters Club: Essays and Artwork from Grown-up Readers (Chicago Review Press, 2021) co-edited with Marisa Crawford, and Kill Marguerite (Emergency Press, 2014.) They also co-edited the volume Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge, 2014) with KJ Cerankowski. Many of the stories in Slug/Kill Marguerite recombine popular genres and forms, including video games, teen magazines, lesbian pop songs, and body horror. Kill Marguerite won the 2015 Devil’s Kitchen Award in Fiction and was named a Lambda Literary finalist in Debut Fiction.
Their criticism concentrates on contemporary literature, film, and performance and visual art, and has been published or is forthcoming in 4Columns, BOMB, Bookforum, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, Fanzine, and the collective blog Montevidayo (now defunct), among other venues. In 2014, their essay on Kate Zambreno’s novel Green Girl received a Critical Hit Award from Electric Literature.
In an interview with BOMB Magazine, Milks was asked about their approach to writing sex: “My main challenge in sex writing is to avoid repetition of verbs. I don’t believe there is or needs to be a division between literary and erotic or even pornographic writing. I am totally happy being prurient and porn-y in my writing. Writing queer sex into literature is crucial and necessary. Doing so speaks back to and defies the many, many attempts to censor queer sex in literature, from the obscenity trials surrounding The Well of Loneliness on up to the recent school board hearing challenging the appearance of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House on a reading list.”
They teach writing at The New School and gender and women’s studies at Pace University. They received their Ph.D. in English Studies from the University of Illinois andt their M.A. in Literature and Creative Writing from Temple, where they were a student of Samuel R. Delany’s.
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