Lydia Paar is an essayist and fiction writer. Her essay, “Erasure,” was of notable mention in The Best American Essays 2022 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, Paar is also a former recipient of a Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation Fellowship. She serves as co-editor for the NOMADartx Review and teaches writing at the University of Arizona. Her first full-length essay collection, The Entrance is the Exit: Essays on Escape, was released in 2024 from the University of Georgia Press.