Dr. Bernard Schweizer, the press’s director, is a Professor Emeritus of English at Long Island University, Brooklyn. Having grown up in Switzerland, Schweizer traveled the world as a young adult, then began his undergraduate studies at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, before moving to the United States in 1990 and graduating from the University of Minnesota with a B.A. in English. Afterwards, he earned a doctorate in English literature from Duke University, and in 2002 he joined the English department at Long Island University (receiving tenure in 2007). Schweizer has an enduring passion for literature that challenges boundaries of accepted social, cultural, and religious norms, and as a result of this interest, he has published critical studies on boundary-pushing travel writers, on the iconoclastic British writer Rebecca West, on misotheists (people who believe in God but hate him), and on irreverent humor in literature and film. Most recently, he has co-edited a pioneering book titled Muslims and Humor: Essays on Comedy, Joking, and Mirth in Contemporary Islamic Contexts. Since 2020, Schweizer has been writing a novel titled Saint Interrupted but has had little luck placing it through conventional publishing channels. The protagonist is a seriously flawed Buddhist spiritualist, whose mis-adventures include seducing an ex-Muslim woman, stealing a truck filled with canned soup, preaching to right-wing Sovereign Citizens in Missouri, and making a killing with the sale of N95 facemasks at the start of the pandemic. The story’s unclassifiable politics and non-conformist cast of characters (a female Muslim apostate, a criminal Buddhist, right-wing Sovereign Citizens, to name a few) have made this story unpalatable to literary agents and established presses. After learning of other authors who were sitting on manuscripts deemed “too blasphemous” or otherwise “beyond the pale,” Schweizer decided it was time to found a publishing house where these “lost souls” and unheard stories would find a home. He established Heresy Press LLC in January 2023 with moral support from a select group of freethinkers, artists, and critics (see Advisory Board).