Short Bio
Elizabeth L Silver is the author of the forthcoming novel, The Majority (Riverhead, 2023), as well as the memoir, The Tincture of Time: A Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty (Penguin Press, 2017), and the novel, The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (Crown, 2013). Her work has been published in seven languages, and optioned for film. Also an attorney, Elizabeth has written for The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and McSweeney’s and currently teaches creative writing with the UCLA Writers Program. She is the founder and director of Onward Literary Mentoring and lives in Los Angeles with her family.
Longer Bio
Elizabeth L Silver is the author of the forthcoming novel, The Majority (Riverhead, 2023), as well as the memoir, The Tincture of Time: A Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty (Penguin Press, 2017), and the novel, The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (Crown, 2013). 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.
The Execution of Noa P. Singleton was an Amazon Best Book of the Year, the Amazon Best Debut of the Month, a Kirkus Best Book of the Summer, Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year, and selection for the Target Emerging Author Series. The Tincture of Time was featured on PBS and NPR, and was an O Magazine/Oprah’s “Ten Books to Pick up Now.”
Elizabeth has been featured on PBS NewsHour, while her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, McSweeney’s, The Dallas Morning News, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review, 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 MA program in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in England, and Temple University Beasley School of Law, Elizabeth has worked as an attorney in California and Texas, where she was a judicial clerk for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and subsequently worked in civil litigation in Los Angeles for several years. 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 currently with survivors of domestic violence in Los Angeles.
Elizabeth is the founder and director of Onward Literary Mentoring, a program that connects writers with award-winning and best-selling authors for tailored writing instruction.
Elizabeth is currently working on a new novel, and several film and TV projects. Born and raised in New Orleans and Dallas, she lives in Los Angeles with her family.