Patricia Lockwood

Patricia Lockwood (born 27 April 1982) is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her 2021 debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her poetry collections include Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book. Since 2019, she has been a contributing editor for The London Review of Books.

She is notable for working across and between a variety of genres. "Your work can flow into the shape that people make for you," she told Slate in an interview in 2020. "Or you can try to break that shape." In 2022, she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for her contributions to the field of experimental writing. Lockwood is the only writer with both fiction and nonfiction works selected as 10 Best Books of the year by The New York Times Book Review. 

At four years, she also holds the record for the shortest span between repeat appearances on the list. Kirkus Reviews has called her "our guide to moving beyond thinking of the internet as a thing apart from real lives and real art." Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She has four siblings. Her father Greg Lockwood found religion while serving as a seaman on a nuclear submarine in the Cold War. His conversion first led him to the Lutheran Church, then to its ministry, and finally to Roman Catholicism. 

In 1984, he asked ordination as a married Catholic priest from then St. Louis Archbishop John May under a special pastoral provision issued by Pope John Paul II in 1980. Lockwood therefore had the unique experience of growing up in a Catholic rectory, with a priest for a father. Lockwood grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and Cincinnati, Ohio, attending parochial schools there, but never went to college.

"She married at 21, has scarcely ever held a job and, by her telling, seems to have spent her adult life in a Proustian attitude, writing for hours each day from her 'desk-bed,'" according to a profile in The New York Times Magazine. During that period, from 2004 to 2011, Lockwood's poems began to appear widely in magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, and the London Review of Books.

In 2011, Lockwood joined Twitter and drew attention there for her comedy and poetics, including the ironic "sext" form she originated, her association with the Weird Twitter movement, and her devoted following. The Atlantic named Lockwood to its list of "The Best Tweets of All Time", where she was the only author included twice. In response to Lockwood's popular tweet ".@parisreview So is paris any good or not," The Paris Review has twice issued reviews of Paris. 

Lockwood contracted COVID-19 in March 2020, and as of February 2021 was still living with Long COVID symptoms. She is married to Jason Kendall, "a journalist, designer, and editor." In May 2022, while they were traveling together for the Dylan Thomas Prize ceremony after a reading with David Sedaris, Kendall developed a cecal bascule in flight from Los Angeles to London and was rushed to Charing Cross Hospital, where he was treated and the cecal bascule spontaneously resolved before surgery.

Lockwood has acknowledged that much of the second part of No One Is Talking About This was inspired by real-life events surrounding her niece Lena, the first person ever diagnosed in utero with Proteus syndrome.