English

Barbara Lawhorn

Barbara Lawhorn

Associate Professor

Composition (ENG 100, 180 and 280) and Creative Writing
M.F.A. Creative Writing (Fiction), Purdue University
B.S.W./Women's Studies, Western Illinois University

  • Office: 216 Simpkins Hall
  • Phone: (309) 298-1103 (Department of English line)
  • Email: bc-lawhorn@wiu.edu

Barbara Lawhorn teaches Basic Writing, College Composition, and Creative Writing at Western Illinois University. She writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, and her most recent publications can be found in Dunes Literary Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Long Leaf Pine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Poetry South, among many others. She's the faculty advisor for Unity, WIU's LGBTQA+ student organization and facilitates the Reading Room Series. Her community based literacy work includes a summer writing workshops series in and book donations to an Illinois youth detention facility, and numerous donations to prison libraries across Illinois. She co-organized grant-funded literacy-centered events for grade and middle schoolers in both Illinois and Iowa, facilitated multiple service-learning projects that integrate adopting second-grade classrooms and creating writing partnerships between second graders and Basic Writers. She's led, with Dr. Rebekah Buchanan, a Creative Writing Club for 4th-6th graders at Edison School. SITREP: Veteran Perspectives on Combat and Peace, a literary magazine dedicated to the creative work of military service members ran for five years, her proudest undertaking with Dr. Jacque Wilson. She writes, reads, eats and bakes pies, seeks the wild within and outside of herself, runs and lifts weights, walks the best-dog-in-the-history-of-the-universe (Banjo) and lives joyfully with her favorite creative endeavors ever, her sons, Mars and Jack.