Andrea Lawlor

  • Clara Willis Phillips Assistant Professor of English
Andrea Lawlor

Andrea Lawlor teaches introductory and advanced courses in creative writing, including fiction writing, poetry writing, queer and trans writing, writing fabulist fiction, writing utopian fiction, and advanced projects.

Lawlor was educated at the University of Iowa, Temple University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s M.F.A. Program for Poets and Writers. They have been awarded fellowships from RADAR Labs and the Lambda Literary Foundation, and won a Whiting Award for Fiction in 2020.

Lawlor is the author of a chapbook of poems, Position Papers (Factory Hollow, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Vintage, 2019). Lawlor’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Ploughshares, jubilat, the Rumpus, the Brooklyn Rail, Encyclopedia and Mutha.

Areas of Expertise

Creative writing; queer & trans writing; utopian writing; fabulist writing.

Education

  • B.A., University of Iowa
  • M.A., Temple University
  • M.F.A., University of Massachusetts at Amherst

HAPPENING AT MOUNT HOLYOKE

Recent Campus News

During Baccalaureate, Mount Holyoke seniors gather together in Abbey Memorial Chapel on the Saturday evening before Commencement. They hear remarks from selected faculty members, classmates and College leadership.

This year Mount Holyoke College will hold the one hundredth anniversary of the Glascock Poetry Contest. Established in 1923, the annual contest is the oldest continuously running poetry contest for undergraduate students in the United States.

What began as a small gathering in 2017 a has developed into the Lavender Ceremony.

Recent Publications

Lawlor, A., “Position Paper #19: Donald Trump” (Ploughshares, 2017)

Lawlor, A., “Position Paper #18: Insurance”(Ploughshares, 2017)

Lawlor, A., “Position Paper #14: The Pacific Gyre” (Ploughshares, 2017)

Recent Awards

2020 Whiting Award winner in fiction. In the words of the selection committee, "Andrea Lawlor's writing is mythic and gritty, lyric and witty, brazenly dirty and teeming with life. Their debut novel is at once a bacchanalian celebration of outlaw living and an old-fashioned bildungsroman, following its seductive, shape-shifting antihero at a gallop on the path to self-discovery. An exacting psychological authenticity puts the reader squarely into the body of a character who’s endangered and radiant at once."

Recent Honors

Was an invited panelist at a number of panels, including the University of California Irvine's Center for Storytelling's "Writing Sex: A Conversation about Writing” panel, moderated by Jonathan Alexander; and the Brooklyn Book Festival's "Beyond the Year of Trans Creativity," moderated by Riley McLeod. Moderated conversations with writers Jung Yun (Odyssey Bookshop), Megan Milks (Books Are Magic), Joss Lake (Books Are Magic), and Callum Angus (Odyssey Bookshop), among others. Was invited to read with Andrea Abi-Karam, hosted by Books Are Magic (Brooklyn).

Moderated conversation with the writer Jordy Rosenberg (UMass) for Grub Street's Writing Conference: "How I Wrote This".

Invited to read and present at a number of series and festivals, including the UA Prose series at the University of Arizona at Tucson’s Creative Writing Program, with writer T. Fleischmann; at the Texas Book Festival, on the "Pop Music & Queer Identity Panel" with Karen Tongsen and the "What Makes a Classic?” panel with Elda Rotor (VP/Publisher of Penguin Classics); and at the Segue Reading Series in New York, with poet Cecilia Vicuña.

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