Lauren Harkawik is an author of fiction and creative nonfiction. She holds a BFA in dramatic writing from Purchase College. Her writing has been published in literary journals including Same Faces Collective, Cutleaf, Autofocus, and others. Her short story, "Joey Button," which was originally published in New Reader Magazine, is currently available worldwide in Short Édition's short story dispensers.
Harkawik is a fiction editor for Story Magazine and for the past five years has served as a jurist for the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She was a 2024 recipient of an Artist Development Grant, supported by the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a previous recipient of a Town Arts Fund Grant from the Arts Council of Windham County.
Harkawik is based in southern Vermont, where she lives with her husband and daughters.
If you are still reading, Lauren would like you to know that she grew up in the suburbs of upstate New York, where there were three malls, many soft serve ice cream stands, and the biggest indoor roller skating rink in the world. Inside that rink was a dance club for children. It was called "Secrets."
When she was 18, Lauren went to a small college to study English. Studying English is mostly about analysis, and she wanted to create. She set her sights on a selective writing program at a slightly larger school and plotted her escape.
The escape came in the form of accepting a semester-long job at Walt Disney World, a place filled with imaginary things. While on the airplane to Orlando, she typed a writing sample on her father’s work laptop, which she submitted to the Conservatory of Theater Arts and Film at Purchase College. That writing sample landed her a spot in a 20-person cohort that intensively studied dramatic writing together for four years (this was the writing program she had set her sights on).
At Purchase, Lauren found her way into a group of friends comprising fellow artists. It was magic. One of those friends was Garret, a filmmaker, whom she fell in love with. This, too, was magic. They have since built an entire life together and gotten married (in that order).
After college, she worked as a child wrangler on the set of a children’s television show before landing a job as the assistant to the president of a talent management company. At the interview for that job, the man who would become her boss asked her why she’d want the job when she could (he may have said, "should") be out creating. She said she needed a job. He hired her. Over the ensuing three years, she learned a lot: about storytelling, about performance, about herself, about professionalism, and about the fact that, indeed, she should be out creating.
In 2011, Lauren was on an Amtrak train from Albany to Manhattan when she spied warm lights emanating from houses in the mountains along the Hudson. She got an idea that that’s where her imagination could run wild: in a house with warm lights nestled somewhere in the mountains. A few months later, she and Garret set off for Vermont, where they have been ever since.
With Garret, Lauren has two daughters, whom she wants nothing more than to be her best self for. She has two brothers, who have, since their births in 1989 and 1992, been a source of inspiration and grounding for her. She has two friends with whom she texts daily, without fail. She met one of them next to a swing set at age nine and she met the other while playing a munchkin in a stage production of The Wizard of Oz at age 13. Their munchkin costumes comprised rainbow toe socks, handmade bloomers, and a rented tuxedo jacket, which they were fitted for inside a suburban mall that no longer exists.
Lauren wants you know every tiny bit of every cell of her being, even the mitochondria, and she also wants to be a little mysterious. Mostly, she wants you to know that some of the weird stuff you’ve thought or felt, she’s thought or felt too.