ABOUT ME

BIO

A playwright, poet, and fiction writer, Elizabeth Gordon was born in Saigon, South Vietnam and grew up in southeast Tennessee. Before committing to full-time writing, she taught English and creative writing at a number of colleges including Providence College, Tusculum College, and the Rhode Island School of Design. Elizabeth received her MFA in creative writing from Brown University and is currently the executive director of the Port City Playwrights' Project. She is married to artist and fellow vegan Tim McDonald and lives in coastal North Carolina with several rescued animal companions. 


RECENT PLAY PRODUCTIONS

Tell Me, The Power of One: Virtual Monologue Showcase, Wilmington, NC
Not Even Blue, Faces of America Monologue Festival, New York, NY
R Is for Rainbow, Wheaton Ten-Minute Play Festival, Wheaton, MD
The Fine Art of Extinction, Ten-Minute Miscellany, Wilmington, NC
Perversity, Articulating the Arts Festival, New York, NY
Angels for the Innocent, Resilience: Three Plays about Women, Wilmington, NC
Bar-B-Q&A, Third Annual Playslam, Cary, NC
Splat! Boston Theatre Marathon, Boston, MA

SELECTED AWARDS & RESIDENCIES

Finalist, Joy Harjo Prize
Individual Artist Fellowship, Literary Arts, Tennessee Arts Commission
CutThroat New Discovery Award
Pushcart Prize nominee
Grant Recipient, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Writers 
Residency Fellowship, Wildacres Retreat for Writers, Little Switzerland, NC
Residency Fellowship, Anam Cara Retreat, County Cork, Ireland

EDUCATION

MFA, Brown University, Creative writing, poetry concentration
BS, East Tennessee State University; English major, history minor



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poem in Appalachian Review

Image
  A slim package came yesterday in the mail. The Spring 2020 issue of Appalachian Review , which includes my poem "Almost Heaven, or Mixed-Race Roadtrip Following the Fall of Saigon." Past contributors to Appalachian Review include Pinckney Benedict, Wendell Berry, Wiley Cash, Nikki Giovanni, bell hooks, Silas House, Fenton Johnson, Barbara Kingsolver, Maurice Manning, Ann Pancake, Jayne Anne Phillips, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Neela Vaswani, Frank X Walker, Crystal Wilkinson, etc. etc., so I feel I'm in excellent company.  The journal used to be called Appalachian Heritage , a name that too many people, according to its website, associated with "a simplistic view of Appalachia as a place frozen in a quaint, bucolic, homogenous past or, at worst, a particular ultra-conservative brand of politics and identity." Hence, the name change.  It's a shame that the word "heritage" has come to carry so much ugly baggage. But it's w
Read more

The Story Silence Tells

Image
Last week I participated in  Southern Griots: Preserving Local History Through Storytelling at the Cape Fear Museum. Organized by Athenian Press , the event featured a lovely array of artists in different genres (poetry, playwriting and screenwriting, dance, filmmaking, music). We shared our work and talents, each of us emphasizing art's ability to lift up, preserve, and pass along human stories that might otherwise be lost. The night before, in anticipation of the event, I kept thinking about stories. Not just those we tell, but those kept secret. As an Asian-heritage person, I know that silence is woven into my cultural legacy. My Asian-American friends and I have talked about the frustrating silence of our Asian parents, about the lack of demonstrativeness, both physical and emotional. Other cultures have this too, of course. Brits are famous for their "stiff upper lip." And Appalachian hillbilly culture, despite its propensity for tall tales, is known for endur
Read more

In Fear of Ecophobia

Image
Yesterday I got an acceptance notice (yay!) from the online literary magazine  Wraparound South , which will be publishing a short essay of mine in audio form. As part of the acceptance, they provided a long list of questions and asked me to answer one of them. (Author responses are included in the "Back Porch" section of their site). The question I picked was "What advice do you have for new and emerging writers?" Here's what I said: I would advise all writers to learn something tangible about the world they inhabit, specifically the natural world, which we too easily forget is the source of all our highfalutin technology. A single microchip takes many times its weight in fossil fuels, chemicals, and water to produce. So even if you’re an ecophobe (which I hope for all our sakes you’re not), you’re still deeply connected to and mutually dependent on the non-manufactured world. If you’re not keen on learning which rare earth minerals make up your laptop, at
Read more