We recently spoke with Nightboat’s 2025 Editorial Fellow, Terrance Wilson Hudson, about writing like they’ve got nothing to lose, discovering Lesbian Peoples, and the differences between working in a bookstore versus a publisher. We’re so excited to publish their reissue project, Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary by Monique Wittig & Sande Zeig, foreword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in 2027.
Lindsey Boldt & Santi Valencia: How did you first get interested in Monique Wittig & Sande Zeig’s Lesbian Peoples? What got you fired up about pitching a reprint to Nightboat?
Terrance Wilson Hudson: I think I discovered it back in 2022. I was researching Amazons and utopian thinking because I was digging into the original Golden Age Wonder Woman comics, and was really struck by this issue where Diana travels into the future and finds the world under the benevolent rule of President Arda Moore. There’s really sticky, interesting thinking about gendered power and ideas of what constitutes love versus mere submission—plus it’s a bizarre old-timey sci-fi story taken to 11. But as I read more and more utopian stories, there’s this constant theme of “oops, these are actually dystopias!” because it’s easier to cave to pessimism than conceive of other, better ways of being I suppose. Delving deeper, I discovered Lesbian Peoples, which was only possible because it was available on the Internet Archive, and it was revelatory to finally find something that actually dared to imagine a world transformed to its very roots and awoken to the delights of expansiveness and mutability. It’s interested in the lacunae inherent to any archive, it acknowledges the failures of the past, the failures that are upcoming, and yet at the end of the day, it’s lived in, it’s real, and it’s necessarily fantastical.
Lindsey Boldt & Santi Valencia: Now that you’re more than halfway through your fellowship, what have you enjoyed most so far? Any other reflections you’d like to share?
Terrance Wilson Hudson: There hasn’t been a thing about this fellowship I haven’t loved! I’ve been introduced to so many startlingly talented people in the Nightboat offices and well beyond. But even beyond providing access to resources and developing my professional skills, this has been transformational for my own personal poetic practice. I’ve discovered so many artists and communities I never would’ve known about without this experience, and the Nightboat team has been gracious enough to provide the perfect cradle for me to melt and metamorphose in all sorts of delightful ways.
Lindsey Boldt & Santi Valencia: You came into this fellowship with a background in bookselling; how has working on an editorial project of your own changed your relationship to books and the literary industry at large?
Terrance Wilson Hudson: It’s really been interesting shifting from bookstore manager to the editorial side of things—to see how information is disseminated from publishers to bookstores and the assumptions that are made, both correctly and incorrectly, about how books are produced and actually sold out in the world.
Lindsey Boldt & Santi Valencia: What kinds of books do you need in the world? Or, what kinds of books are you most excited to work on in the future?
Terrance Wilson Hudson: What I really need are books by queer people of color written feverishly, selfishly, and decadently. People writing like they’ve got nothing to lose, because we don’t, really. Silence won’t save us, bowing to propriety won’t save us, and we’re bound by countless chains every day. Don’t self-impose your own. You might as well make art that fucking rocks.