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 been showcased in such publications as Huffpost, Literary Hub, The Missouri Review, Essay Daily, Witness, Farmerish, Hayden's Ferry Review, and COMP, and has been nominated for such prizes as the Pushcart and Best of the Net. An MFA recipient from Washington University and an MA recipient from Northern Arizona University, Paar is also a former recipient of a Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation Fellowship and of a Millay Arts Residency. She serves as co-editor for the NOMAD Review and teaches writing at the University of Arizona. Her first full-length essay collection, "The Exit is the Entrance: Essays on Escape," was released in 2024 from the University of Georgia Press.