Milo Todd
Instructor Statement
"Being in an all-queer writing workshop space was a life-changing experience for me. In the summer of 2019, I attended the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ+ Writers. For one week, approximately sixty queer writers across countries, races, backgrounds, and genres traveled to Otis College in Los Angeles for the same goal: to be understood.
It was the closest I’d ever experienced magic in the real world. It was a fundamental joy I didn’t realize I was missing, to be able to relax my shoulders, my jaw, to remove my tongue from the roof of my mouth. For one week, I felt like I got to be a person.
After returning home to Boston, I realized opportunity for a professional-level, queer-only literary space was nearly nonexistent outside of this retreat. While I knew I couldn’t create the same physical, in-person components as Lambda Literary, I knew I could at least create space where the layers of socio-cultural burden were stripped away from workshop and craft, providing opportunity for queer writers to finally stop explaining themselves so they could finally start writing.
Since 2019, I’ve been observing, listening, and planning. What I’ve come up with is, I feel, a program that not only serves the majority of the queer novel writing community, but additionally serves an untapped space in most creative writing programs.
I firmly believe in creating learning environments where students feel safe sharing their work, feedback, worries, and goals. The publishing world is a difficult place at the best of times, starting with the individual workshop experience, and I believe information and community support can break down gatekeeping and help queer writers succeed in their goals.
I saw what these experiences did for me. Now I want to do what I can to bring them to others."
About the Instructor
Milo Todd (he/him) is a writer, speaker, and instructor. He’s a Lambda Literary Fellow, a Massachusetts Cultural Council grantee, and co-EIC for the award-winning LGBTQ+ literary journal, Foglifter Journal. He also runs The Queer Writer newsletter. His debut novel, The Lilac People, is a national bestseller, a New England Book Award Finalist, an Indie Next Pick, an Amazon Editor’s Pick, an Apple Best of the Month Pick, and has received starred and/or glowing reviews from such places as Publishers Weekly, Foreword Reviews, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, the Washington Post, WBUR, Electric Lit, and more. About The Lilac People, Shelf Awareness said Milo “has made an enormous contribution to historical fiction” and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called Milo “an important new voice in American fiction.”