Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik (forthcoming 2022), Landscape with Sex and Violence (2017), and If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012), all with YesYes Books, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem:100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015).

Lynn’s new book I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence and Dolly Parton, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022. Lynn’s book is an exploration of Dolly Parton, her work, and her legacy, as it intersects with feminism, American history, our current cultural and political moment, and Lynn’s own history. “It’s a deeply personal riff on music, examining how Dolly’s music engages trauma—delving into sex, violence, class, nostalgia, religion, aging, addiction, and motherhood.”

“It is also a very personal project.” Lynn continues. “In 2018, at the crest of one of the most difficult years of my life, I brought my family from Brooklyn to Dollywood, an amusement park in East Tennessee created by the legendary country singer. The trip, for me, was a reckoning with my traumatic, often violent past, and the cap on a decades-long obsession with a singer whose impoverished background in the rural south is so different from my own middle-class Jewish upbringing in Los Angeles. Still, Dolly Parton’s twin identities as feminist icon and objectified sex symbol in so many ways reflect my fraught history with rape culture and my more recent reclamation of my voice and power. My difficult year left me wanting to get to the bottom of just what it is I love and need to say about Dolly.”

“There will be many threads and themes that weave through the book: the sexist, classist assumptions that often adhere to Dolly and upstage her talents; the bigotries inherent in the music world that are mirrored in literary culture; the double standards applied to women’s appearances and public behaviors that persist even in our #MeToo moment; the transcendence, flexibility and interpretive genius of Dolly’s voice; my relationship to and the upshots of my history as a victim of violence; and the tangled relationships in marriage and parenting that define and complicate women’s lives. A Spotify playlist of Dolly songs that I created in 2012 will serve as a song-by-song guide and thematic backbone to my exploration of Dolly’s oeuvre and enduring allure.”

The book should be completed by the end of 2021 and will be published in 2022!

Lynn’s poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and A Public Space. Her essays have appeared in air/light, LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture.

A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y. Born in Indianapolis, she grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Please visit Lynn’s Twitter and her website for more information.