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 Letting Grief Speak: Writing Portals for Life After Loss by Diane Zinna (Columbia University Press 2026)
• “Love, Mom” (poem), The Watershed Journal
• Guest editor, The Watershed Journal
• 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
• “‘Tangled Up’ in Backstory”, Pennwriters
• “Leaving the Bubble,” Six Feet Apart…in the Time of Corona Anthology
• Sometimes Ted Lasso Isn’t Enough, Brevity Blog in April 2022.
• Review of naturalist Scott Weidensaul‘s book,  A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds, 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.)
• Lynn’s Weigh was featured in People magazine’s “Half Their Size” weight-loss edition in 2008 and again in 2022, and was featured on CNN’s FitNation with Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
• 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.
• Freelance work: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Temple Medicine, Washington & Jefferson Magazine, Pursuits Magazine and Canada’s Trade and Commerce.

Awards

• First place Pennwriters’ NOVEL BEGINNINGS Award for my forthcoming novel, Between Here and Gone
• 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