Liz was born and raised in Denver, where the mountains are majestic and everything else is flat and brown. After attending a ridiculously lavish prep school, Liz went to a neo-hippie college, where she received a fun but useless liberal arts degree.

Her degree led to a series of McJobs, which led to work as a nonprofit grantwriter, which lead to sitting in a cubicle and wearing pantyhose. This led to an existential crisis. She shed the pantyhose and enrolled in massage school.

Somewhere in there she experienced a couple more existential crises, one of which reminded her how passionate she was about writing.

She wrote a pretty bad novel, then decided it was time to seriously study craft. Since then, she has devoted her life to the oddly conducive combination of writing and massage.

She's a 3-time Pushcart Nominee, runner-up for the 2007 Juked Fiction Prize, and winner of the 2005 Berkeley Fiction Review's Sudden Fiction Competition.

Liz lives in Portland with her husband, a bookseller, musician, and music journalist. Writing about herself in the third-person makes her giddy with power.

She refuses to Twitter, but hopes you'll friend her on Facebook

To learn about Liz's massage practice, click here >>

photograph by Dylan Lee