Work samples

  • The Claire McCardell Project
    The Claire McCardell Project
    In 2018, I began researching and writing about Maryland-born fashion pioneer Claire McCardell, who helped invent American fashion in the 1930s and '40s. Here I am in the fall of 2022 on a panel with, among others, fashion icon Tory Burch, to discuss Claire's life and legacy. In addition to publishing essays about Claire, I am now writing a book for Simon & Schuster about Claire's feminist aesthetic and her lasting influence on design and culture. (Clockwise from top left: Victoria Pass, April Calahan, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Tory Burch)
  • After the Cure
    After The Cure, a Personal Essay

    "A story took root in me at a young age: Something was wrong with my mother, and by extension, with me. We were tangled up in one another, the way so many mothers and daughters are. I wanted nothing more than to fall into the effortless affection of two people who loved one another unguardedly, and I believed that if I could save my unhappy mother, I might save myself, too." This essay about my mother's mental illness was published as a cover story for The Washington Post Magazine in 2020. It was read by more than 100,000 people and garnered over 300 positive comments. It is included in my memoir-in-essays collection, Ghosts in the Museum.
  • The Case of the Stolen Ruby Slippers
    The Case of the Stolen Ruby Slippers
    "After watching the FBI news conference, I couldn’t get the question of what had happened to the ruby slippers out of my mind. Soon, I was pulled into the mystery, too." In 2019, I went in search of the stolen ruby slippers from the movie "The Wizard of Oz" and my story, which has been optioned by Warner Bros. Television, is both a true crime saga and a cultural exploration of how ordinary items transform into coveted and meaningful witnessing objects. "The Case of the Stolen Ruby Slippers" is posted in full in my portfolio below and is included in my memoir-in-essays collection. Illustration by Jan Feindt.
  • Excerpt from "On Nostalgia"
    "On Nostalgia" is a braided narrative that uses the object of the Archimedes Palimpsest, which is housed at The Walters Art Museum, as a way to examine the hidden layers of my family's secrets. This piece was originally  published in Passages North and won the Hrushka Nonfiction Prize. It is included in my memoir-in-essays collection. Here is an excerpt from that essay. Please take care: this essay mentions suicide.

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About Elizabeth

Baltimore City

I am a journalist, essayist, and author living in Baltimore city. My writing has appeared in publications such as the The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Slate, Metropolis, and Harper’s. My literary nonfiction has been recognized as notable in The Best American Essays anthology and  earned the Hrushka Nonfiction Prize, among other accolades. My fiction has published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Southern Review, PANK, more

A Memoir in Essays

Ghosts in the Museum is a memoir, told through a series of linked essays, that focuses on the ways in which we curate and understand our lives through the objects that surround us. I examine how everyday objects can transmogrify into valuable artifacts and magical totems through the act of our attention and mythmaking. Our material culture is imbued with the meaning we give it, and as the art historian Glenn Adamson accurately writes in his book Fewer, Better Things, “a single thing may carry hundreds of stories about the people who made it or who have lived with it.”

This book begins with the discovery of a suitcase that belonged to my late father. The objects and letters stored inside reveal clues to a hidden history: my grandmother’s mysterious suicide at the age of 48, and the secreted past of my father’s family.  These items also help me to understand the foundations of my parent's fraught marriage, particularly my mother's untreated mental illness.

As I attempted to uncover the truth of my family’s past through these objects, I found myself unable to confront my story head on. So I turned to the stories of other relics—a pair of ruby slippers from the movie “The Wizard of Oz” that were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Minnesota; a collection of vintage dioramas created by Frances Glessner Lee depicting death scenes; an ancient palimpsest at the Walters Art Museum—and these objects helped enlighten my personal journey. 

Part memoir, part detective story, part social history, this book uses the few objects I have from my father as the locus for an exploration into the nature of objects, inheritance, family history, and the consequences that long-held secrets and trauma can have across generations. At its core, Ghosts in the Museum is a study of the narratives that we create about our lives and the objects that we choose to contain these stories. And how, when personal truths are inscrutable, we can place our intangible hopes and desires into a tangible proxy in an effort to better understand the arc of a human life.

Essays included in this memoir have earned numerous awards as well as recognition in Best American Essays. 
  • The Witnessing Object
    The Witnessing Object
    Object: My Father's Suitcase // The magic of objects is how their stories can change over time. We learn, we take stock, or, sadly, we forget and have to learn again. Museums, the good ones, are never static. Each generation enters the back storage with fresh eyes, inviting new perspectives and understanding. In our own lives, we can take our memorabilia and lock our pasts into something fixed and immutable. Or, we can understand that myth-making is ongoing. When our personal truths are inscrutable, we can place our intangible hopes and desires into a tangible proxy, all in an effort to better understand the arc of a human life. “A single thing may carry hundreds of stories about the people who made it or who have lived it,” Adamson writes in Fewer, Better Things. “The challenge is to read those stories.”
  • The Best American Essays
    The Best American Essays
    Object: A Suicide Note // “Notes From a Suicide,” one of the essays that appears in my collection Ghosts in the Museum was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognized as notable in The Best American Essays anthology.
  • After the Cure
    Object: My mother's notebook

    "After the Cure" first appeared as a cover story for The Washington Post Magazine in 2020, and it swiftly became one of the publication's most read personal essays. It's included in my memoir collection.
  • The Pothunters
    Object: A house museum of stolen artifacts

    For centuries, everyone from archaeologists to amateurs pillaged Native American artifacts — and human remains. I venture inside the harrowing true crime story of American pothunters . This piece, which is included in my memoir-in-essays, earned the 2022 Gene S. Stuart Award from the Society for American Archeology, given to the author of "the most interesting and responsible original story or series about about any archaeological topic published in a newspaper, magazine, or online publication." 
  • The Case of the Stolen Ruby Slippers
    Object: The ruby slippers 

    What happens when the world’s most iconic pair of shoes—the ruby slippers of Oz—are stolen from the historic home of Judy Garland? This is a story of gossip, obsession, and a 13 year hunt for answers that ended in an FBI sting. It is also an examination of how ordinary objects can become magical totems through the power of human myth. This is also available as an audio story via Curio.
  • The Case of the Stolen Ruby Slippers Cover
    The Case of the Stolen Ruby Slippers Cover
    My story on the stolen ruby slippers of Oz became one of the most-read stories on the Washington Post site after it broke the news of who was caught by the FBI in possession of the contraband. This story has since been optioned by Warner Bros. Television.
  • On Location
    On Location
    Here I am in Minnesota as I investigate the case of the stolen ruby slippers during a frigid polar vortex that saw temperatures drop to -45 degrees farenheit.
  • On Nostalgia
    Object: The Archimedes Palimpsest

    This personal essay braids the story of an ancient palimpsest with the family secrets kept by my father. First published in Passages North, this is a recipient of the Hrushka Nonfiction Prize and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Please take care: this essay mentions suicide.
  • The New Yorker
    The New Yorker
  • The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death
    Object: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death

    For this New Yorker article, I write about Frances Glessner Lee, a millionaire heiress who pioneered forensic crime scene investigation with doll houses in the 1940s. I spend time with the dioramas, and consider the ways in which these objects hold stories of tragedy, and empathy, for women.

Unhemmed: Claire McCardell and the Birth of American Fashion

In the 1930s and ‘40s, when New York was little more than a textile warehouse copying the designs out of Paris, Claire McCardell dared to create clothes for American women and become one of the first to get her name on her own label. Claire eschewed the male-dominated vision of fashion at a time when Paris and haute couture ruled the global marketplace, in order to create clothes that fit women’s bodies as well as their mounting ambitions. She tossed out corsets and crinoline and girdles in favor of a casual, confident look that was equally refined and relaxed. She sewed real pockets into her dresses because, as she once said: “men are free from the clothes problem — why should I not follow their example?”

In the process, Claire designed iconic American sportswear that remains a staple of our wardrobes today, from ballet flats and leggings to separates and wrap dresses. Claire continues to inspire designers from Michael Kors to Isaac Mizrahi to Anna Sui, the later who told me that Claire is timeless for the way she modernized how women dress.

Claire was born in Frederick, Maryland, and her personal archive is housed at the Maryland Center for History and Culture. In 2018, I delved into that archive, and others, for an essay about her work that was published in The Washington Post Magazine.

Now, I'm writing a book about Claire for Simon & Schuster, due out in the spring of 2025.Unhemmed is the story of Claire, but it is also a story about our bodies and our rights to choose how to dress, which is a sartorial symbol of our right to choose how we live. Claire once said: “It wasn’t me in the clothes, or just wearing them, that interested me, it was the clothes in relation to me — how changed I felt once in them.” Claire's creations contained an alchemy that so many of us still seek: the ability to command the narrative of our own bodies, and to be seen not as mere eye candy or reproductive vessels, but as a person to be reckoned with.


  • Claire McCardell "Future" Dress
    Claire McCardell "Future" Dress
    Photo of Claire by Erwin Blumenfeld, from the digital archive collection housed at the H. Furlong Baldwin Library, Maryland Center for History and Culture
  • Publishers Marketplace Announcement for Unhemmed
    Publishers Marketplace Announcement for Unhemmed
  • Claire McCardell Profile
    Claire McCardell took on the fashion industry — and revolutionized what women wear. Here's a 2018 profile that I wrote about her innovative Monastic Dress. You can also hear this story read via the Curio app. 
  • Fashion’s Unsung Hero: A Conversation about Claire McCardell’s Lasting Influence
    In 2022, I joined the Maryland Center for History and Culture to explore what attracts contemporary fashion designers, historians, and writers to the legendary Maryland designer, Claire McCardell. This virtual conversation included Tory Burch, American Fashion Designer and Entrepreneur; April Calahan, co-creator/host of the podcast Dressed: The History of Fashion; and me. Victoria Pass, Associate Professor of Fashion and Design History at The Maryland Institute College of Art moderated. We also discussed how each of us personally connected with Claire and her work, and what happened in our personal journeys when we found Claire’s designs.
  • The Claire McCardell Project - Frederick Maryland
    When the Frederick Art Club began its project to build a statue of Claire McCardell in downtown Frederick, Maryland, they made a short documentary about her life and work. The group asked me to offer insights into Claire's life and work for the film. The resultant bronze statue, designed by artist Sarah Hempel Irani, now sits on Carroll Creek in the historic downtown.
  • Claire McCardell circa 1940s
    Claire McCardell circa 1940s
    Photo by Herbert Matter, courtesy of the H. Furlong Baldwin Library, Maryland Center for History and Culture
  • The Gal Who Defied Dior
    The Gal Who Defied Dior
    In 1955, Betty Friedan, age 34, she was a mother of three living in Queens and juggling a new freelance writing career. She was also forming the ideas that would become her 1963 feminist cri de coeur, The Feminine Mystique. Friedan had an inkling that “something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today,” as she later wrote, and she was in search of those who were liberating themselves from the confines of housework and child rearing. She chose Claire McCardell, and wrote an article under the attention-grabbing headline "The Gal Who Defied Dior."
  • Maryland Center for History and Culture honors fashion pioneer Claire McCardell
    I talk about Claire McCardell's lasting influence in this television report produced by WJZ in Baltimore.

Architecture and Design Writing

For over two decades, I have written about architecture, design, cities, and culture for magazines. Some initially see this as a narrow speciality. I see it as a window into the very thinking of humankind. What we build speaks volumes about who we are as a culture.

My work has illuminated the often overlooked history of restricted covenants and redlining; the ways in which building design is harnessed against women trying to access reproductive health; the power of race and gender in architecture; the role of defensive design in disenfranchising certain communities. 

My articles and essays have appeared in The New York TimesThe New York Times MagazineThe Washington Post MagazineSlateMetropolisCurbedCityLab, Design Observer, and Fast Company’s CoDesign, among many others. I was a contributing editor with Architect magazine for more than a decade, and have been an editor with Fast CompanyMetropolis, and Next City. From 2004-2007, I was editor-in-chief of Baltimore's Urbanite magazine. I have won numberous awards for my writing about architecture and design, including, most recently, a 2022 Architectural Journalism Award from the American Insitute of Architects, Baltimore Chapter.


  • We are Different People in Different Places
    We are Different People in Different Places
    "When I write about a city, or a building, or an urban plan, I also write about human life and aspiration and the ways in which our human-made culture impacts and informs our daily selves. Architecture is nothing short of humankind’s values write large..." My writing often moves beyond the page, and here I am at WYPR recording an online essay about architecture and place for the Maryland Humanities Council.
  • The Architecture of Civility
    An essay about creating true public space in cities, read on-air at WYPR for The Maryland Humanities Council.
  • Visions of the City
    Architects Pavlina Ilieva and Kuo Pao Lian are bringing unique and modern ideas to historic Baltimore.
  • Architecture and the Battle Over Abortion
    The battle over women's reproductive health and access to safe abortion care has been waged in the built environment. For this story, published in 2020, I look at the ways in which architecture is being politicized and weaponized against women's health.
  • Snake in the Grass
    In 1893, Edward H. Bouton took up an urgent matter with his lawyers. He wanted to know if he could legally keep Black people out of Roland Park.
  • The Marc Steiner Show Interview
    I wrote a piece about the bigoted and racist restrictive covenants in the planning of Roland Park in Baltimore, and was featured as a guest on The Marc Steiner Show.
  • The Rise of the User Generated City
    The Lewis or Clark of today is sitting safely behind a laptop and instead of mapping terra incognita, he is placing red pin tabs over his favorite tattoo parlors.
  • Riot Architecture
    Defensive architecture was the answer to the 1968 riots in Baltimore. How will architects respond to the urban uprisings of 2015?
  • I.M. Pei
    I.M. Pei
    Louvre Pyramid: The Folly that Became a Triumph. I wrote about the architect I.M. Pei for Architect magazine on the anniversary of his controversial and lauded renovation of the Louvre in Paris.
  • Louise Brigham Profile
    Louise Brigham Profile
    For Curbed magazine, I wrote a profile on the late designer Louise Brigham, who pioneered "box furniture" and advanced the idea of sustainable design.

Fiction

My short stories have published in places like McSweeney’s Internet TendencyThe Southern ReviewPANKTriQuarterly ReviewRevolverPost Road, and The Little Patuxent Review and have been nominated for the Pushcart PrizeMy short story “A Modern Girl’s Guide to Childbirth” was selected by Roxane Gay as one of the  2015 Wigleaf Top 50 (very) Short Fiction winners and I have twice earned the Maryland State Arts Council's Independent Artist Award for my fiction.  
  • Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
    Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
    Reading at the Baltimore Book Festival
  • McSweeneys
    McSweeneys
  • Emails to My Agent From Inside the Mall of America’s Writers’ Residency
    A short humor story published by McSweeney's Internet Tendency
  • Danish Modern
    "Danish Modern" first published in The Little Patuxent Review and it was a nominee for The Pushcart Prize.
  • "The Sea Of Tranquility" (excerpt) by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson by The Southern Review/LSUP
    My short story "The Sea of Tranquility" was published in The Southern Review and the magazine asked me to read an excerpt.
  • The Last Bullet
    "The Last Bullet" is a short story that published in the magazine TriQuarterly.
  • Birthright
    "Birthright" first published in Revolver magazine.
  • Review of “Birthright” in Ploughshares Magazine
    My short story “Birthright” was reviewed by Ploughshares Magazine and called one of the best short stories on the web.
  • The Inner Loop Reading Series
    The Inner Loop Reading Series
    Reading my work in D.C. for the Inner Loop.
  • A Modern Girl’s Guide to Childbirth
    "A Modern Girl's Guide to Childbirth" published in PANK magazine and was selected by author Roxane Gay as a 2015 Wigleaf Top 50 (very) Short Fiction winner because I was a writer “willing to take chances and cut through flesh to show us the gleaming white of bone."

Press / Interviews / Readings

Over the years, I have read my writing in front of live audiences and on podcasts, and I've been interviewed  about stories that I have written and the craft of writing. Here is a sampling of readings, interviews, and craft essays, which have been featured in places like Harper's magazine, The Southern Review, and PANK.
  • Reading: Danish Modern
    Reading my Puschart Prize-nominated story, "Danish Modern," for The Little Patuxent Review at Oliver's Carriage House in Columbia, Maryland.
  • Your Own Devices by Harper’s Magazine
    I sat down with the web editor of Harper's Magazine, Violet Lucca, to discuss my article in the March 2022 issue of the magazine about the Right to Repair movement, which seeks to empower users to fix ailing devices rather than consign them to the trash heap.
  • Hey Baltimore Podcast
    Hey Baltimore Podcast
    In 2017, I was featured on the podcast Hey Baltimore! to talk about my New Yorker story about Frances Glessner Lee and her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.
  • Baltimore Literary Whiz Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson Talks Writing
    In advance of hosting a creative writing workshop at the annual CityLit Festival, I was interviewed by the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance.
  • Monsters, Ghosts, and Grief by The Inner Loop Radio: A Creative Writing Podcast
    I talk literary ghosts and haunted houses and creepy dollhouse murder scenes with the literary mavens of The Inner Loop. I also read from my memoir-in-progress. (Our conversation starts about 18 minutes in)
  • Interview with Passages North about On Nostalgia
    An interview with Passages North magazine about the writing of "On Nostalgia," winner of the magazine's 2015 Hrushka Prize.
  • Interview with PANK Magazine
  • Fiction is First Podcast
    In 2015 I was featured on the Fiction is First Podcast, where I read my essay Notes from a Suicide and discussed its origins with host Ben Forstenzer.
  • Little Patuxent Review Craft Essay
    The literary journal Little Patuxent Review asked me to write a craft essay about generating fiction.
  • Contemporary Southern Women Writers
    Contemporary Southern Women Writers
    For this 2022 article, author Kelly Ford writes about the most compelling Southern female authors, and she includes me on her list.

Profiles of Artists

I have interviewed and profiled many different artists as a way to catalogue their creative work. The subjects of my writing range from  bestselling writer Neil Gaiman, to the pioneering jewelry designer Betty Cooke, to graphic designer Ellen Lupton, to a cohort of comic book illustrators who stage "art fights" live. Here are a few of these profiles.
  • Betty Cooke
    Betty Cooke
    A profile of Baltimore's own modernist designer, jeweler Betty Cooke.
  • Betty Cooke Profile
    Profile on Betty Cooke in the Washington Post Magazine
  • Neil Gaiman Profile
    Neil Gaiman Profile
    In 2022, I profiled the bestselling author Neil Gaiman. “Neil breaks life down to the fundamentals of what it is that makes us human,” the actor Jon Hamm tells me. Hamm started reading Gaiman’s novels, including “Good Omens,” around the time he moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting, and now he plays a role in the Amazon Studios and BBC Studios series based on the book. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) “It’s not about what makes us American, or what makes us Black or White or any of the labels that we’ve established for ourselves over the course of however many millennia we’ve been here, but what it is that connects us.”
  • Neil Gaiman Profile
  • Super Art Fight
    Super Art Fight
  • Super Art Fight Profile
    A profile of comics artist and illustrator Jamie Noguchi and the gonzo performers of Super Art Fight, who draw characters and creatures as they battle each other in a live competition.
  • Pavlina Ilieva and Kuo Pao Lian
    Pavlina Ilieva and Kuo Pao Lian
    I profiled Architects Pavlina Ilieva and Kuo Pao Lian about their Baltimore-based architecture studio for The Washington Post Magazine. The full story is linked to in the architecture writing portion of my portfolio.
  • The Elms of Castine Profile
    OK, not *technically* a profile on an artist...sometimes I profile things like trees. Why? Because the coastal Maine village of Castine has been caring for its American elms for centuries. This is one of the few places in the world where you can still see a landscape of mature elm trees, some of the rare survivors of Dutch Elm Disease. 
  • Rocket to Venus
    Rocket to Venus
  • Rocket to Venus Documentary
    I follow filmmakers John Benam, Brian Carey and Geoff Danek as they try to find the story of Robert Condit and the rocket that he built in 1920s Baltimore for a documentary titled “Rocket to Venus.”

Literary Events and Community Building

Writing and the creation of art do not happen in isolation. The vibrancy of a city is fueled by its diversity of voices and by the creative exchange of ideas. An important aspect of my writing life is building and sustaining the community of artists, editors, and aspiring writers who live in and around Baltimore.  I have taught community writing courses, volunteered in Baltimore City Public Schools, organized readings and literary events, and served as a moderator and a host for visiting authors and artists. Just a few of the venues and organizations through which I  have done this work include The Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore CityLit, The Ivy Bookshop, and The Baldwin Prize, an essay competition founded by Lionel Foster for students at Baltimore City College High School.


  • Writers Live! at the Enoch Pratt
    Writers Live! at the Enoch Pratt
    In 2022, I interviewed the critically acclaimed author Lydia Millet for the Enoch Pratt Library's Writers Live! Series.
  • CityLit Festival
    CityLit Festival
    How do we access and tell stories outside of the mainstream? In 2018, I developed a nonfiction workshop for the CityLit Festival as a part of my Rubys Artist Grant project titled."Writing From the Margins: Uncovering our Hidden Narratives Through Creative Nonfiction." Baltimore authors celeste doaks, Saida Agostini, and Tonee Moll talked of their writing and how they challenge notions of race, class, gender, ethnicity, family, and identity through their storytelling. We read poetry, memoir, journalism, essay, and discussed the craft of research and writing creative nonfiction.
  • CityLit Festival
    CityLit Festival
    I was asked to talk about the research and writing of memoir for a panel titled "Truth & Trauma: How We Write Authentic Stories of Pain." Writers across genres—Kristina Gaddy, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Cija Jefferson, Wallace Lane and Neda Semani—write global and local stories of war, loss, death, illness, abuse, crime, and discuss researching and writing trauma, as well as the effect working with difficult subjects can have on a writer.
  • Understanding Your Rights: Contracts 101
    Understanding Your Rights: Contracts 101
    One of the most disturbing trends in the arts right now is the rise of the work made for hire contract and the ways in which contracts are written to limit or completely remove copyright from the creator. I developed a workshop for artists in Baltimore titled Understanding Your Rights: Contracts 101. It introduced artists to the fundamentals of copyright and contracts, from understanding the difference between a work-made-for hire and serial rights sale, to the myriad ways that they can protect their work and image in the era of Zoom. This course was meant to be beneficial to writers, artists, filmmakers, and those signing adjunct faculty contracts and included expert legal input from John Mason, an arts and entertainment and intellectual property attorney and a literary agent with Copyright Counselors, LLC and Mason Literary.
  • 2017 Rubys Reading at Bird in Hand
    2017 Rubys Reading at Bird in Hand
    As a recipient of a 2017 RUBY'S Artist Award, I read with my fellow writers at Bird in Hand.
  • Baltimore Writers Conference
    Baltimore Writers Conference
    I was a featured speaker at the 2016 Baltimore Writers' Conference hosted by Towson University. I led a full session teaching aspiring writers how best to pitch and sell their work to magazines, literary journals, and Websites.
  • Book Events at The Ivy Bookshop
    Book Events at The Ivy Bookshop
    Over the years, I've hosted many conversations with authors at The Ivy Bookshop to highlight their latest work, including an evening with art historian Sarah-Neel Smith as she discussed her book about modern art in post-war Turkey.
  • The Baldwin Prize at City College
    The Baldwin Prize at City College
    I have served as a volunteer writing mentor for students of Baltimore City College as they work on personal essays inspired by the work of James Baldwin. Each year, the Baldwin Prize honors those students who craft the most compelling personal essay based on that year's specific prompt. The competition, founded by City College alumni Lionel Foster, is meant to help young people use the written word to explore their humanity and their place in the world.
  • Mapping Baltimore Apartheid
    For this event hosted by the Baltimore Architecture Foundation and Baltimore Heritage, I moderated a discussion with Lawrence Brown, author of The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America.Dr. Brown put Baltimore under a microscope, looking at the causes of segregation and drawing on extensive research of data and policy. This was followed by a discussion and Q&A moderated by me.
  • Design Conversations and the D Center
    Design Conversations and the D Center
    In 2008, a group of us—composed of artists, architects, designers, urban planners, and community activists—began hosting an open community event in Station North called Design Conversations.In 2009, the series received a grant from the Baltimore Community Foundation for making “a significant contribution to Baltimore’s vibrant arts and cultural scene." These free conversations lasted through 2013, and became a catalyst in forming D Center Baltimore, a broad cross-section of disciplines and individuals invested in improving and encouraging design—in all its iterations—Baltimore.

2017 Baker Artist Award

I had the great honor of earning the Mary Sawyers Baker Prize for the Literary Arts in 2017, and the effect that the Baker has had on my work is immeasurable. In the years since, the memoir that I talked about in my Baker awards video has evolved into the memoir-in-essays that I am completing now.  The support and artistic freedom offered by this award supported the creative evolution of this writing, and I am forever grateful.

Here is the video created after I won that year's prize for the Literary Arts. Please take care: this video mentions the subject of suicide.
  • Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
    Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
    Mapping a writing project on the wall of my office.

Books, Magazines, and Collaborations

I've had the great fortune of assisting on projects and collaborating with other writers, artists, designers, nonprofit organizations, and creators to develop, edit, and write a variety of projects, from articles in our local BMore Art Magazine to nonfiction books about topics like design thinking and neuroaesthetics. Here are a few examples of this work.
  • Think Wrong
    Think Wrong
    Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo and Do Work That Matters is a book that teaches readers how to use radical and creative problem-solving techniques to reliably produce surprising, ingenious, and seemingly magical answers to challenging questions.
  • Your Brain On Art
    Your Brain On Art
    I assisted authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross in writing their New York Times bestselling book Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. The book, which came out in March 2023 from Penguin RandomHouse, blends research, insights from multidisciplinary pioneers, and compelling stories to highlight the findings from the emerging field of neuroaesthetics, which shows how the arts, in all their iterations, can enhance our lives. It features conversations with artists such as David Byrne, Renée Fleming, and with evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson.
  • Collaboration with Larder
    Collaboration with Larder
    A beautiful broadside made “in Baltimore, in the strange Spring of 2020” by the curators and chefs at Larder restaurant. This limited run letterpress print includes a micro short story about my grandmother, Irene, and her Baltimore style sauerbraten.
  • Desire Lines Essay
    Desire Lines Essay
    I partnered with photographer Nate Larson for a photo-essay about the concept of desire lines in Baltimore.
  • Mapping Desire
    Desire lines act like contrails of human existence. They have a story to tell.
  • Open Space, Sacred Places
    Open Space, Sacred Places
    Open Spaces Sacred Places is a book about the work of the TK Foundation that "dramatically demonstrates how nature has the power to heal and unify in our increasingly frenetic 21st-century world." I edited the project.
  • Urbanite Magazine
    Urbanite Magazine
    From 2004-2007, I was the editor in chief of Urbanite, a monthly magazine about cities and city life as seen through the distinctive lens of Baltimore. Each issue revolved around a central theme and used a range of perspectives, voices, and story types to illuminate aspects of urban living and connect the city to larger issues globally. I worked with many writers, photographers, artists, and illustrators from around Maryland to create each issue.