Lucas Crawford

Lucas Crawford is Professor and Canada Research Chair of Transgender Creativity and Mental Health at the Augustana Faculty of the University of Alberta, where his work spans queer theory, transgender studies, histories and literatures of madness, popular culture, twentieth-century literature, histories of design and space, fat embodiment, disability, Jewish philosophy and history, and the public arts and humanities in general.

Lucas is the author of one monograph and four books of poetry on these topics. In reverse order, they are: Muster Points (U of Calgary Press 2023), Belated Bris of the Brainsick (Nightwood Editions 2019), The High Line Scavenger Hunt (U of Calgary Press 2018), Transgender Architectonics: The Shape of Change in Modernist Space (Routledge 2016), and Sideshow Concessions (Invisible Publishing 2015). Sideshow Concessions won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, while Belated Bris of the Brainsick won the J.M. Abraham Award as best poetry collection published by an Atlantic Canadian author in 2019.

Lucas’s academic work on gender, sexuality, and architecture – the early stages of which were supported by his 2007 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship – appears widely in publications such as Places and Transgender Studies Quarterly and earned him UC-Berkeley’s 2019 Arcus Foundation prize.

Lucas’s present role sees him divide his time between organizing, supervising, and writing. On this first count, Lucas is the founding director of “Rewriting Ourselves: Poetry in the Psych Ward,” a two-year pilot project funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, which will soon bring a thirty-session poetry curriculum to our peers on the inside. He also co-organizes VERS/E, a popular monthly queer poetry night in Edmonton known for its lively open mic and free poetry broadsides.

Writing-wise, Lucas is working on a new book of poems (“My Masochist Mitzah”), a collection of personal essays (“Small Dick Energy”), a monograph about transgender artists’ and authors’ definitions of mental health (“Get Mad”), a series of graphic poems cocreated with artist Morgan Sea, and a long-term side project about fatness as “figure” in queer theory and fiction (“Slender Trouble”). All in due time!

Lucas is generally suspicious of claims to being the “first” anything, though he is proud to have added transgender presence to the Foundation’s early days.