Elizabeth Graver

Elizabeth Graver (born 1964) is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction.

Life

Graver was born in Los Angeles on July 2, 1964, California, and grew up in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She 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. Married to civil rights lawyer James Pingeon, Graver is the mother of two daughters.

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. Her 2013 novel, "The End of the Point," has met with praise since its release. The novel, featured by New York Times Book Review editor Alida Becker,^[1] is set in a summer community on the coast of Massachusetts from 1942 through 1999 and is a layered meditation on place and family across half a century. Graver's first 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."

Awards

• 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, for Have You Seen Me? (Judge: Richard Ford)
• 1991 Cohen Award Ploughshares Magazine, for “The Mourning Door”
• Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 1991
• National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1992
• MacDowell Colony Fellowships, 1997, 2009, 2011, 2012
• National Book Award in Fiction Long List for The End of the Point, 2013

• Her work has been anthologized in: Best American Short Stories (1991, 2001)
• Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards (1994, 1996, 2001)
• The Pushcart Prize Anthology (2001)
• and Best American Essays (1998)

Works

Novels

• The End of the Point (2013)
• Awake (2005)
• The Honey Thief (2000)
• Unravelling (1999)

Short Stories

• Have You Seen Me? (1991)

Anthologies

• "Two Baths", The Best American Essays, 1991
• “The Mourning Door” Best American Short Stories; in Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards; and in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, all in 2001.

References

External links

• ElizabethGraver.com. Author's Website
• National Book Award Fiction Long List 2013
• Boston Globe Review, The End of the Point
• New York Times Review, The End of the Point
• Here and Now with Robin Young: NPR Interview
• Judicial Review, March 2013: Discussing The Point of Elizabeth Graver's 'The End of the Point'
• Boston College Front Row: Graver on Researching The End of the Point (video)
• Leonard Lopate Show, NPR Interview, 3/5/13
• Washingtonpost.com Interview
• Boston College Front Row, 2004. Graver reads from Awake
• The Book Show #1291, with Joe Donahue WAMC/NPR
• New York Times Book Review: Unravelling
• *New York Times Book Review: The Honey Thief
• "Walker Evans, Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead, 1936"
• "The Mourning Door"
• "Paper Cuts", New York Times
• "Physiological Form Meets Psychological Space: Elizabeth Graver's Four-Dimensional Stories," by Jacob M. Appel, Fiction Writers Review