Liz's profile

Background

Liz hails from Columbia, MD, and now calls Baltimore her home. She has a Bachelor's in English - Creative Writing from Towson University and has an MFA in Creative Writing - Fiction from University of Florida. Her work has appeared in Knee-Jerk Magazine, Six Sentences (nominated for a Six of the Month Award), The Muse, and on various places online. She currently teaches and tutors writing at different schools, including Howard Community College and Maryland Institute College of Art.

Teaching

I call myself a full-time part-time teacher, meaning I work almost 40 hours a week tutoring and teaching as an adjunct at area schools. I teach because I love it, not simply to support myself. Thus I often find myself torn in how I view myself professionally: both writing fiction and teaching composition are fulfilling and challenging. To my surprise I've cultivated a professional identity as a composition teacher, and I'm interested in questions that intersect with my own writing: How can we teach tone and voice in a meaningful and effective way? Who are millennials and are they really that different as students? I have given a few presentations and workshops at local academic conferences, more than I expected to when I got my MFA in 2008.

Writing Philosophy

I am drawn to collages, pastiches, and albums. About half of my work is easily categorized as fiction; the other half is more like nonfiction-poetry-prose-notes. My work is small in scope, often taking the form of collected mini-chapters. I am fascinated by the intersection of prose and poetry. Poetry has an attractive freedom to it, and I like the surprise and sharpness of an unexpected image.

I'm obsessed with how the mundane, the tragic, the hilarious, and the absurd work comfortably together in life (and on the page). For this, living in northern Florida was a big influence on me. There, boundaries are loosely enforced - people live outside, bring alligators inside - and no one questions anything. One feels that one is at the edge of the world. My work aims to capture this feeling.

And while my writing is literary, an important goal is to amuse and please readers. I started writing publicly on the internet when I was 17 years old, and after over-sharing the details of my life for a few years, I developed an abstracted, fictionalized version of my own character. I continued the blog through college, studying abroad in England, the death of my best friend, various relationship failures, and graduate school in Florida. Over time, I became more interested in the difference between the public self and the private self - and how the two affect each other. Today I work intermittently on my personal website, Good Pie to You, where I treat each post as a work of literary essay, while also trying to be readable, novel, entertaining, and not suffocatingly emo. I really try.

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