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

Actor, playwright, screenwriter, singer, songwriter, producer and director John Cameron Mitchell will be at Mount Holyoke College on Monday, March 10, 2025, for a screening and discussion of his 2001 film “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”

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.”

Recent Publications

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

Lawlor, A., “” (Ploughshares, 2017)

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

Lawlor, A. (2025) Invited Speaker. Kelly Writers House. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, April 2025.

Lawlor, A. (2025) Invited Speaker. Writers in Camden. Rutgers-Camden, Camden, NJ, April 2025.

Lawlor, A. (2025) Panelist. The Center for Fiction presents Queering Form: Weird Fiction, with Kazim Ali, Henry Hoke, Andrea Lawlor, and Mecca Jamilah Sullivan. Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, Los Angeles, CA, March 2025.

Lawlor, A. (2025) Moderator. In conversation with Emma Donoghue, Center for Fiction, Brooklyn, NY, March 2025.

Invited guest on the podcast This Queer Book Saved My Life, with guest Saraid de Silva (aired June 2024).

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