Lyz Lenz (born 1982) is an American author and editor. She was previously a columnist at The Cedar Rapids Gazette and served as managing editor of The Rumpus. She is the author of God Land and Belabored.^[1][2][3][4]

Life and career

Lenz moved from Vermillion, South Dakota to Minneapolis, Minnesota while in high school and graduated from Eden Prairie High School. She has an undergraduate degree from Gustavus Adolphus College.^[5] Lenz belonged to Evangelical churches but came into conflict with their orthodoxies including on the role of women in the church and the exclusion of gay and lesbian people.^[6]

Lenz's writing has been published by publications including the Columbia Journalism Review, The Washington Post, and The Gazette. A divorced mother, she wrote in Glamour about her self-imposed 2-year hiatus from cooking.^[7]

In September 2019, Lenz was a moderator for an LGBTQ discussion with U.S. presidential candidates Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.^[8] She was accused of racial bias based on her line of questioning with Kamala Harris contrasted with the questioning she gave Elizabeth Warren.^[9]

Lenz's first book, titled God Land explores her personal experiences and the role of religion and politics in rural America during the Trump era.^[10][5][11] Her second book, Belabored, focuses on the rights and autonomy that pregnant women ought to be afforded, the ways in which religion and politics impacts how pregnant women are treated in the U.S., and her own experience of being pregnant.^[12]

In 2005 Lenz moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.^[13]