Skip to content

Dr. Ilya Novak

Dossier

Former Ethicist, Now Poet.

Ilya spent a decade writing rules meant to keep harm at bay. The rules got longer; the harm learned to read.

He began drafting poems inside his compliance documents—margins full of apologies and weather. When he sent us a stack of policy PDFs with the poetry highlighted, we told him to stop hiding.

His first collection with us, The Exception List, is annotation-as-lyric: footnotes that confess, redlines that bleed into verse.

Current status: touring salons; dictating new work on train platforms and sending the timestamps like proof he was there.