Erica Trabold is a Nebraska-born essayist. Her debut essay collection, Five Plots, was selected by John D’Agata as the inaugural winner of the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and awarded a 2019 Nebraska Book Award for nonfiction. Her chapbook Dots was published in 2021 as the winner of Ghost Proposal’s 5th Annual Chapbook Contest. In 2023, Erica co-edited the anthology The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth From the Margins with Zoë Bossiere, later named a finalist for the Foreword Indies.
Trabold’s own lyric essays appear in Brevity, The Rumpus, Passages North, The Collagist, South Dakota Review, Seneca Review, Essay Daily, and elsewhere. A graduate of Oregon State University’s MFA program and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Erica writes and teaches in central Virginia, where she is an Assistant Professor at Sweet Briar College.