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Professor Shayla Lawson
Place of Birth
Rochester, MN
Current Home
Brooklyn, NY
Education
University of Kentucky, Degree in Architecture
Indiana University—Bloomington, M.F.A. in Creative Writing
Favorite part of teaching at Amherst?
Unequivocally, the students.
Research Interests
Pop culture, but make it fashion and tell it slant.
Awards and Prizes
MacDowell and Yaddo Artist Fellow
Favorite Book
Zami, by Audre Lorde.
Favorite Author
Toni Morrison.
Tips for aspiring writers?
Don't worry about "aspiring" to anything. Live your life first, then write. You need the time to find your story.
Tell us a bit about your path to becoming an author
In order to become who I am, I had to quit many things. I graduated from college with combined BA/MA degrees and planned to practice architecture immediately, but ended up struggling with the symptoms of an undiagnosed autoimmune disease which kept me on the couch in my parents' home for over a year. As I started to get better, I took an internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy; Venice—my sophomore year study abroad—by that point having become my second home. I met some of the most incredible people of my life there and had the best adventures, many of which I still write about. After returning to the States, to New York City, to begin my architecture career, the recession hit. Despite the supposed security guaranteed the profession during my college years, architecture was not a recession-proof industry. I watched most of my friends have to leave NY to move back home. I kept my job at the architecture firm because my bosses (who knew I was a writer and freelanced for arts & culture magazines in my spare time) shifted me from design to marketing, paying me half the salary of the more senior woman I replaced. The lesson was brutal but useful. I never thought I could make a successful go of a career in writing because "writing" wasn't a serious profession—but here it was, the only thing that saved me. It would be another four years before I attended graduate school and made my career shift. In the interim, I married my boyfriend and moved to the Netherlands (his home country) to become a housewife. He encouraged me to publish my first poetry collection and apply to graduate programs in America. We divorced around the time I finished. He moved back to the Netherlands and I took jobs in Portland, Oregon—first as a middle school teacher (since the 3 p.m. workday schedule gave me most of the day to write), through which I published my second book, and later as a copywriter for web and social at some firms that were direct feeders to Nike and Google, where I'd write through most of my evenings and weekends to finish my third poetry collection and the proposal for This Is Major. I was offered the professorship at Amherst just at the moment I was telling my agent there was no way I could write a full-length essay collection with a 60-hour-a-week marketing job. And now, with the book in the world and several new projects in process, here I am.