Associate Professor, English, and Director, Gender and Queer Studies
Laura Krughoff is a fiction writer and essayist, who teaches creative writing. Her scholarly interests include the history of marriage, the relationship between law and literature, and the representation—and emerging effects—of marriage equality in LGBTQ literatures. Her debut novel, My Brother’s Name, was a finalist for a 2014 Lambda Literary Foundation Award. The book explores the notion of pragmatic “gender passing” in which the main female character, in an attempt to help her brother who struggles with mental illness, adopts his identity and attempts to survive in his world without losing herself in the process. Her most recent publication, Wake in the Night, is a collection of short fiction that spans a century of women’s lives in rural Indiana. She is currently at work on short fiction and essays which explore topics from religious harm to queer family formation in the wake of marriage equality. Her work has appeared in publications including The Threepenny Review, the Gay Voices section of Huffington Post, and a podcast of the Chicago-based story-telling performance collective Second Story.