In this episode, I chat with author Elizabeth L Silver about her new novel The Majority, women in the workplace and motherhood, teaching creative writing, and books.
Elizabeth L Silver is the author of The Majority , as well as the memoir, The Tincture of Time: A Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty , and the novel, The Execution of Noa P. Singleton . Her work has been called “fantastic” by the Washington Post and “masterful” by The Wall Street Journal, has been published in seven languages, and optioned for film.
Elizabeth has been featured on PBS NewsHour, while her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, New York Magazine, The Guardian, Harper's Bazaar, McSweeney’s, The Dallas Morning News, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, among other publications, and she has been a recipient of residencies at several artist colonies in the United States, France, and Spain, including Ucross Foundation, Ragdale, Byrdcliffe Artist Colony, where she was the recipient of the Patterson Fellowship, A Room of Her Own Foundation, where she was a consultant, and the British Centre for Literary Translation.
She has also served as a judge for the PEN Center Literary Awards, UCLA’s James Kirkwood Literary Prize, AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize, twice served as a PEN in the Community Teaching Artist through PEN Center USA, where she curated a program teaching creative writing to prisoners in Lancaster, CA, for cancer patients and survivors with The Benjamin Center, and at a halfway house in Los Angeles; she has also served as a mentor in Fiction for AWP's Writer-to-Writer Program, and taught English as a Second Language in Costa Rica, writing and literature at Drexel University and St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She currently teaches creative writing with the UCLA Writers Program.
A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, the MFA program in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in England, and Temple University Beasley School of Law, Elizabeth has also worked as an attorney in California and Texas, where she was a judicial clerk for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, worked on death row cases in Texas, and subsequently in civil litigation in Los Angeles. She continues to keep a foot in the law, and her most recent legal (volunteer) work includes working on asylum cases at the Texas-Mexico border and with survivors of domestic violence in Los Angeles.
Elizabeth is also the founder and director of Onward Literary Mentoring, a program that connects writers with award-winning and best-selling authors for individual, tailored writing instruction.
The Majority, Elizabeth L Silver
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