MSU College of Education Associate Professor Laura Apol was awarded or honored by internal and external organizations for her exemplary teaching and writing, especially in regard to her poetry.
Apol received the first-ever Excellence in Teaching Award from the MSU Center for Gender in a Global Context (GenCen). The award is part of the 2025 Paper and Activism Awards. It denotes Apol as an advocate for and committed to “trauma-informed teaching and cultivating an environment of care” in her classrooms.
“I’m forever grateful to have been a student in one of Laura’s classes,” said Megan Castleberry, who was a student of Apol’s Women’s Studies 301 class. Megan was quoted in the 2024–2025 issue of Intersections, published by MSU GenCen. “She taught me so much about empowerment, especially empowering women, and even though we discussed a lot of heavy topics, she made it possible for us to get through them.”
According to MSU GenCen, the Excellence in Teaching Award “recognizes GenCen-affiliated instructors who demonstrate outstanding teaching and commitment to student success through innovative instructional practices, contributions to curriculum development and leadership within their field and/or the field of women’s, gender and sexuality studies.”
Awarded author
Apol is the author of six full-length poetry collections, including “cauterized,” released in 2024 by Michigan State University Press.
For “cauterized,” Apol was named as a finalist for the 2025 Midwest Book Award (an award she previously received in 2022 for “A Fine Yellow Dust”) and a longlist finalist for the 2024 Julie Suk Poetry Award.
The Midwest Independent Publishers Association presents the Midwest Book Awards and Jacar Press distributes the Julie Suk Poetry Award. Winners of both will be announced at a later date.
MSU Press describes “cauterized” as Apol returning to “themes of loss that are, at least partly, cauterized ... Apol offers insight into the ways some wounds need cautery to begin to heal.”
The nominations are the latest of writing- and book-centered accolades for Apol, who was the Lansing-area Poet Laureate.from 2019-2021. Selected other honors include the Phillip McMath Award (2023) and a silver medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (2019) and the 2015 ArtPrize Anthology Competition (winner). Similarly, Apol has also been recognized for her teaching with several MSU awards, as well as fellowships at external organizations. In addition to her role as a professor in the Department of Teacher Education, Apol is a Core Affiliated Faculty/Staff for MSU.