Andrea Lawlor

they/them

  • Associate Professor of English
  • On leave, 2024–2025
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

Legal scholar and New York Times bestselling novelist Alafair Burke spoke at Mount Holyoke College about how her liberal arts education led to a career as an author of 20 crime novels.

Mount Holyoke College faculty member Andrea Lawlor’s novel, “Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl,” was ranked number 10 in T Magazine’s “The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature.”

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.

Recent Publications

Lawlor, A. (2024). Foreword. In V. Woolf, Orlando (pp. xiii-xix). Penguin Random House.

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

Invited to serve as an Advisory Board member of the Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing & Publishing at the Cleveland State University Poetry Center (2021-present)

Served as a Fiction Mentor for the Periplus Collective in 2023-2024.

Was an invited judge for a number of literary contests or prizes from 2021-2024, including for Lambda Literary, the Publishing Triangle, and the Columbia University's Undergraduate Fiction Prize.

Was an invited presenter at a number of conferences in 2024, including the CUNY Grad Center’s Rainbow Book Fair (New York, 2024), "Transfigured Flesh: Shapeshifting, Embodiment and the Nonhuman in Trans Narratives" and "Writing the Literary Sex Scene: Dethroning the Male Gaze" at the Association of Writers & Writing Program’s Annual Conference. (Kansas City, KS. 2024).

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