Beginning a career in poetry, her collections include Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book.

"[1] In 2022, she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for her contributions to the field of experimental writing.

[6] Her father Greg Lockwood found religion while serving as a seaman on a nuclear submarine in the Cold War.

Lockwood therefore had the rare experience of growing up in a Catholic rectory, as part of a traditional American nuclear family, but with a priest as a father.

"[12] "She married at 21, has scarcely ever held a job and, by her telling, seems to have spent her adult life in a Proustian attitude, writing for hours each day from her 'desk-bed'," according to a profile in The New York Times Magazine.

[13] During that period, from 2004 to 2011, Lockwood's poems began to appear widely in magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, and the London Review of Books.

[17][18] In 2012, small press Octopus Books published Lockwood's first poetry collection, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black.

[22] In July 2013, general interest website The Awl published Lockwood's prose poem "Rape Joke",[23] which quickly became a viral sensation.

[31] The book, called "electric" by The New York Times and "remarkable" by The Washington Post, chronicles her return as an adult to live in her father's rectory and deals with issues of family, belief, belonging, and personhood.

Lockwood has acknowledged that much of the second part of No One Is Talking About This was inspired by real-life events surrounding her niece Lena, the first person diagnosed in utero with Proteus syndrome.

"[39] In The Wall Street Journal, Emily Bobrow called the novel "artful" and "an intimate and moving portrait of love and grief.

"[44] Praising her "fine thinking" and "purposeful comedy," The New York Times Magazine's Wyatt Mason concluded, "Nothing will get you to read literary criticism" if Lockwood can't.