Elizabeth never goes anywhere without a book. As a child she read everything, from Harriet the Spy and Peter Pan to her mother’s collection of classics, such as David Copperfield and the poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Her older brothers introduced her to science fiction and fantasy novels. (She read Anne McCaffrey’s first Pern trilogy so often, the books fell apart.) And as she read, she wrote. And wrote. When she was a college senior, two of her poems were published in a college anthology of poetry.
Armed with a bachelor’s degree in English, she arrived starry-eyed in New York City during the middle of a recession, hoping for a job in publishing. Any job. Any job at all. Four long months later she was hired as an editorial assistant at Jove Publishing, then briefly worked for Simon & Schuster, and finally landed with Bantam Books as an editor working on romance fiction and women’s fiction. During that time, she wrote and published five romance novels.
After living in New York for six years, she emptied her bank account and went to live in Paris. When she returned to the States, she moved into the old family home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, changed her title from senior editor to consulting editor, and became one of the first telecommuting editors for Bantam Books. She also wrote a young adult novel, Free Fall, which was published by HarperCollins Publishers in 1994, when she was pregnant with her second child.
Marriage and motherhood took all of her attention for several years, as well as establishing her own freelance editing business. Elizabeth now lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, with her two adult children nearby, and divides her time between editing, teaching, and, of course, writing.