About

Thanks for stopping by! You can contact me at lynn.haraldson@gmail.com or join me on Facebook, Instagram @ZenBagLady, Bluesky @writerlynn.bsky.social, and Substack

Greatest Hits:

• Grieving the Living
• Turn & Face What’s Changed
• Things
• Love is Patient, Love is Kind. Damn It, I Keep Forgetting
• Laid Bare By a Questionnaire
• Pain is NOT an Identity
• Hope is Our Only Hope
• A Love That Could Never Be
• To See, Change, and Unlearn: Confronting My White Privilege
• The One About Sixth Grade
• Feeling the Feels of 2020
• Diamonds Aren’t Always a Girl’s Best Friend
• Hip as a Mustang (in honor of my father)
• Why I Love Rebecca Pearson (“This is Us” Spoiler Alert)
• Goodbye, Dad (in memory of my father)
• Etched in Stone
• Signs

Current Publications

• Contributed to the book Letting Grief Speak: Writing Portals for Life After Loss by Diane Zinna (Columbia University Press 2025)
• “Love, Mom” (poem), The Watershed Journal (Fall 2024)
• Guest editor, The Watershed Journal (Fall 2023) (also available on Amazon)
• Memoir: An Obesity of Grief: A Journey from Traumatic Loss to Undying Love (Koehler Books 2023)
• “From a Bike’s-Eye View”, Pipestone County Star, September 2022
• “‘Tangled Up’ in Backstory”, Pennwriters (Sept/Oct 22)
• “Leaving the Bubble” was published in the anthology, Six Feet Apart…in the Time of Corona (Acorn Publishing, Dec. 2022).
• My essay, Sometimes Ted Lasso Isn’t Enough, was published on the Brevity Blog in April 2022.
• I reviewed naturalist Scott Weidensaul‘s book,  A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds, on the Brevity Blog. 

Resume

• In May 2018, I earned a master’s degree in literature and composition from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
• I volunteer in the prison system, teaching classes in writing and poetry. I was also, prior to the pandemic, the advisor and editor of the inmate-written newsletter, The Grove, at the State Correction Facility – Pine Grove in Pennsylvania. (See Reading & Writing in Prison.)
• I was a writer at The Clarion News from 1996 through 2002. My bi-monthly op-ed column, Been There, Done That , won the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania’s Golden Quill Award in 1999 and was a finalist in 2001. I also won the Marie Spencer Hutchinson Memorial Prize for Essay Writing in 1994 and 1999.
• Lynn’s Weigh was featured in People magazine’s “Half Their Size” weight-loss edition in 2008 and was featured on CNN’s FitNation with Dr. Sanjay Gupta. I had the great fortune to be a guest contributor to the FitNation blog.
• Other media includes being a guest on Oprah, Today, Entertainment Tonight, CNN, 60 Minutes Australia, local television, several national radio shows, and Joy Bauer’s Joy Fit Club. I was interviewed for the article “The Fat Trap” published in New York Times Magazine in January 2012.
• I wrote the foreword to Dr. Barbara Berkeley’s book, Refuse to Regain: 12 Tough Rules to Maintain the Body You’ve Earned (Quilldriver Books, 2008), and for two years, coauthored the blog Refuse to Regain.
• As a freelance writer, my work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Temple Medicine, Washington & Jefferson Magazine, Pursuits Magazine and Canada’s Trade and Commerce.

Awards

• First place 2023 Pennwriters’ NOVEL BEGINNINGS Award for my forthcoming novel, The Mister
• Press Club of Western Pennsylvania’s Golden Quill Award, Columns: Non-Daily Newspapers
• Finalist, Golden Quill Awards, Columns: Non-Daily Newspapers
• Two-time winner of the Marie Spencer Hutchinson Memorial Prize for Essay Writing, Clarion University of Pennsylvania’s Women’s Conference