Lilly Dancyger

Lilly Dancyger is an American author born in New York. She is the author of First Love: Essays on Friendship and Negative Space, and editor of the anthology Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger. Her essays have been published by The New York Times, Elle, Slate, and Brevity, among other outlets. She writes the newsletter The Word Cave.

Dancyger received an Artist Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was named a "Writer to Watch" by BookPage. Her memoir Negative Space was selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards.

Early life and education Dancyger grew up in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. She dropped out of Bard High School Early College at the age of 14 and earned a GED. She later graduated from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts with a BA in Literary Studies and received an MA in Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Career Dancyger was the Memoir Editor at Narratively from 2014-2020, during which time she also worked as a freelance journalist, writing for outlets such as Rolling Stone, Glamour, The Cut, and others.

Her 2021 memoir Negative Space details her investigation into her father's life, who had an addiction to heroin and died prematurely, through the art he created. Gabino Iglesias from NPR and Claire Rudy Foster from The Rumpus both praised the work's nonlinear narrative and exploration of grief.

Ann Levin from Associated Press described her 2024 work First Love: Essays on Friendship as "vivid, thoughtful, and nuanced." Julia Shipley from The Philadelphia Inquirer also gave the collection a positive review.

She currently teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA programs at Randolph College and Columbia University School of the Arts.