About

Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is a fat, queer, and invisibly disabled writer, teacher, and advocate and the author of the poetry collection Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books) as well as two chapbooks: Pharaoh’s Daughter Keeps a Diary (forthcoming from Kissing Dynamite Press) and The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press). Her poems and essays have appeared in Pleiades, 32 Poems, CALYX, So to Speak, The South Carolina Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, SWWIM, and Up the Staircase Quarterly among others, and she has been a finalist for the Frontier Poetry Breakthrough Chapbook Comptetition, the Black River Chapbook Competition, the C&R Press Book Award, the Santa Fe Writer’s Project Literary Award, and the Page Prize for Nonfiction.

Emily received an MFA in creative writing from Georgia College & State University and is currently a PhD candidate at Georgia State University where she serves as a graduate editor for Beyond Bars, a Mellon Grant-funded literary journal created in collaboration with writers from Philips State Prison. Emily’s creative and academic interests in Disability and Fat Studies as well as her commitment to inclusive and trauma-informed pedagogy are fueled by her own experiences as a neurodiverse learner. She worked as a learning specialist for students with disabilities for five years and recently served a two-year term as the President of the Board of Directors for Grant Park Cooperative Preschool, a nonprofit learning center dedicated to closing racial and economic gaps in early childhood education. A former Navy brat, Emily lives in Atlanta where she teaches first-year and creative writing at Agnes Scott College.

Books

Home and Other Duty Stations - Kelsay Books [Review] - 2020
[Also available on Amazon]

The Way the Body Had To Travel - Dancing Girl Press [Review] - 2014

Selected Publications

Poems

• “Safety” SWWIM.
• “Contrapuntal Written to Take Up Less Space” CALYX.
• “A Man on the Street Says I Must Be Fine Because I’m Clearly Not Skipping Any Meals” Burrow Press Review.
• “WOMEN WITHOUT A COUNTRY” Passangers Journal.
• “Paradise” and “Lifeguarding” Pleiades.
• “Bird” ONE Art.
• “Ode to Lizzo” Up the Staircase Quarterly.
• “Concerning the results of your ACE screening” Limp Wrist.
• “If I have a home, it’s been on fire for decades” Poetry Online.
• “Latrophobia (Induced by Internalized Fatphobia) So to Speak.
• “Change of Address” and “The Last Birthday Party” ONE Art.
• “My male professor asks haven’t women been writing about this for decades already?” Glass: A Journal of Poetry.
• “Pastoral in Quarantine” Atticus Review.
• “Try something different this time” Birdcoat Quarterly.
• “Luxury” HOBART.
• “How to explain coronavirus to your children” The Shore.
• “My Therpist Says When There’s Trauma, the Body Keeps the Score” Exhume.
• “Pharaoh’s Daughter Keeps a Diary” Kissing Dynamite.
• “Desert Vacation” Atticus Review.
• “Pharaoh’s Daughter Keeps a Diary” Rust + Moth.
• “Rainy Season” Midway Journal.
• “Mirage” SWWIM.
• “Brat in the Garden of Eden” 8 Poems.
• “The Escape Artist.” Stirring: A Literary Collective.

Essays & Reviews

• “Heterochromia” HerStry.
• “American Pastoral for the 21st Century” Still: The Journal.
• “A History of the Body as Told Through Reality Television” So to Speak.
• “The Lake’s Only Daughter” The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.
• “A Review of Lisa Fay Coutley’s Tether” The Adroit Journal.
• “Ambivalence” HOBART.
• “On ‘My Mother as Penelope’.” Structure and Style.

Awards and Nominations

• Finalist/Shortlisted - 2023 C&R Press Poetry Award
• Finalist - 2023 Breakthrough Chapbook Contest, Frontier Poetry
• Finalist - Spring 2022 Black River Chapbook Competition, Black Lawarance Press
• Finalit - Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award
• Honorable Mention - Limp Wrist Glittler Bomb Award
• Finalist - Page Prize in Creative NonFiction
• Semi-Finalist - Button Poetry Chapbook Contest 2022
• Semi-Finalist - Tomaz Salamun Prize
• Semi-Finalist - Sundress Publications Open Reading 2021.
• Nominee - Georgia Author of the Year Awards 2021
• Nominee - “Best of the Net 2019” Atticus Review.
• Third Prize - “2019 Atticus Review Poetry Contest” Atticus Review.
• Nominee - “Best of the Net 2018” Nightjar Review.