Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing

Elizabeth Hand is the bestselling author of sixteen multiple-award-winning novels and four collections of short fiction. Born in San Diego, she grew up in New York's Hudson Valley, the setting for much of her work, before moving to Washington D.C., where she studied cultural anthology and playwriting at Catholic University. She worked for eight years as a photo archivist for the National Air and Space Museum before moving to Maine to write full-time. Her recent, critically acclaimed novels featuring Cass Neary, “one of literature’s great noir anti-heroes” [Katherine Dunn] — Generation Loss, Available Dark, Hard Ligh, and the forthcoming The Book of Lamps and Banners— have been compared to those of Patricia Highsmith and have been optioned for a TV series. Several of her books have been New York Times and Washington Post Notable Books, and her short stories have been adapted as plays and podcasts. With Paul Witcover, she created and wrote the influential DC Comics series Anima, the first comic to feature gender-fluid characters and to engage with the ongoing AIDS epidemic. Since 1988, she has been a reviewer, critic, and essayist for the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Village Voice and Salon, among many others, and writes a regular book review column for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her historical thriller, Curious Toys, inspired by the outsider artist Henry Darger and a true crime in 1915 Chicago, will be published in 2019 by Mullholland Books/ Little, Brown, who will also publish The Book of Lamps and Banners in 2020. She has two grown children, and lives in Maine and London with her partner, UK literary critic John Clute.