Elizabeth Kadetsky earned her B.A. in Latin American studies and Spanish and Journalism from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She earned her master’s of science in journalism from Columbia University and her M.F.A. in fiction from the University of California at Irvine. She is the author of a lyric memoir, The Memory Eaters; a novella, On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World; a story collection, The Poison that Purifies You; and a memoir, First There Is a Mountain. Her short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and two Best American Short Stories notable citations, and her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Santa Monica Review, Antioch Review, and elsewhere. Her prominent work in journalism comes from her covering Latin America, immigration, and gender in the 1990s, where she published a lot of immersive pieces in Ms. Magazine, Self, Glamour, The Nation, The Village Voice, and more.
She has been a fellow at Camargo Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Ucross Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the St. James Centre for Creativity in Malta, MacDowell and many other creative writing residency programs. She was a Margaret Bridgman scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as a two-time Fulbright scholar to India. She is the winner of the 2019 Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction. For a while she worked as a freelance copy editor for Details, Rolling Stone, Elle, and New York Magazine, until she got her first teaching job at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2001. Since then, she has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and University of Pittsburgh. Currently, Kadetsky is an associate professor of creative writing (fiction and nonfiction) at Penn State University and is also the nonfiction editor at New England Review.
