Lydia Paar

Lydia Paar is an essayist and fiction writer. Her essay, “Erasure,” was of notable mention in the 2022 Best American Essays collection, and was the 2020 winner of North American Review’s Terry Tempest Williams Creative Nonfiction Prize. The New England Review nominated her as a finalist for their 2021 Emerging Writers Award, and works of hers have also been showcased in such publications as Huffpost, Literary Hub, The Missouri Review, Essay Daily, Witness, Farmerish, Hayden's Ferry Review, and others. An MFA recipient from Washington University and an MA recipient from Northern Arizona University, Lydia teaches writing at the University of Arizona and loves to help students uncover their own unique project goals and strategies, no matter how unusual. Her own first (and unusual) full-length essay collection, The Entrance is the Exit: Essays on Escape, is forthcoming this September 1st from the University of Georgia Press.