Elizabeth Graver
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Elizabeth Graver (born 1964, Los Angeles) is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. Her novels include Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her short story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her essay "Two Baths" appeared in The Best American Essays in 1991. Her story “The Mourning Door” was awarded the Cohen Prize from Ploughshares Magazine and appeared in Best American Short Stories; in Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards; and in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, all in 2001.
Graver grew up in Williamstown, Massachusetts and received her B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1986, and her M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1999. She also did graduate work at Cornell University. A recipient of fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, and The National Endowment for the Arts, she has been a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Boston College since 1993.
Graver writes character-driven psychological fiction set in a wide variety of times and places, as well as more experimental short fiction, and non-fiction essays on a variety of subjects. One novel, Unravelling, is set in 19th-century America in the Lowell Textile Mills and tells the story of a fiercely independent young woman and the life she eventually fashions for herself. The Honey Thief, a contemporary novel, explores a mother/daughter relationship, as well as the fall-out of living with--and losing--a mentally ill father. In Awake, Graver uses the genetic disease Xeroderma Pigmentosum to explore a mother's relationships with her sons, her husband and, eventually, her lover; the novel is set at a camp for children with this rare disease. In a review of Unravelling in The New York Times Book Review, Benjamin DeMott wrote, "Exceptional . . . Intensely imagined, right-valued, memorable." In a Chicago Tribune review of The Honey Thief, John Gregory Brown wrote, "One of our finest writers on the grand drama of simply growing up."
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