Elizabeth Cox is the John C. Cobb Professor of Humanities at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC where she teaches creative writing.  Her poetry, short stories and novels have been published to wide acclaim over several decades.   Her novels include Familiar Ground (1984), The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love (1991), Night Talk (1997), and most recently, The Slow Moon (2006).   This spring she was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers and she received the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, recognizing her distinguished writing career.  Elizabeth has taught creative writing at Wofford, Duke, MIT, Tufts and other institutions and has extensive workshop experience.

Praise for Elizabeth Cox’s Writing

“To begin with, it takes a strong, loving, and careful eye to see the real world; then it takes a judicious as well as a compelling text of words and melody to express it; then it takes courage to let the narrative rest, as it often must, not in a satisfying resolution but at the edge of a cliff. Those who know Elizabeth Cox as a person and as a writer know that she is continually courageous and melodious and has never yet softened the difficult facts of the world. Her stories are treasures, full of truth, possibility, and beauty.”

“What I so admire about Elizabeth Cox’s stories are their restraint and their clarity. The deceptively quiet worlds she imagines and her seemingly simple sentences gradually betray fissures and complexities that have the power to thrill.”

“Elizabeth Cox’s stories are instantly compelling and richly gratifying. She writes with a bold, direct narrative style, but it is suffused with warmth and lovely description. She concocts a portrait of the South that is familiar but not stereotyped, intricate, but not muddy or full of kudzu.”

About the Doe Branch Ink Writers’ Retreat

At Doe Branch, we focus on the plot, the pace, and the way the story is structured; but, most of all, I emphasize (and demonstrate) how a character comes alive through detail and dialogue.  We will use participant work to look closely at how a character can live on the page, and I will bring examples from various books to underline these point.  We will read and discuss everyone’s work, finding better ways to bring characters to life.