People

Laura Apol is a poet and an associate professor of literacy and curriculum in the College of Education, Department of Teacher Education. She has published widely in the areas of poetry education, children's and YA literature, and arts-based research methodologies. She has worked in a number of international contexts (Rwanda, Indonesia), and has recently published Poetry, Poetic Inquiry, and Rwanda: Engaging with the Lives of Others (Springer International, 2021), which is drawn from her work using writing to facilitate healing among survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, and which brings together arts-based inquiry, international collaboration, and the therapeutic uses of writing in response to trauma.

Dr. Apol is the author of a number of prize-winning collections of poetry, including Crossing the Ladder of Sun, winner of the Oklahoma Book Award for poetry; Requiem, Rwanda, runner up for the Lascaux Prize; Nothing but the Blood, silver medal winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award; A Fine Yellow Dust, winner of the Midwest Book Award; and, most recently, Cauterized, finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. Her work has three times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice been nominated for Best of the Net. From 2019-2021 she served as the Lansing-area poet laureate.