If you'd like to know who Elizabeth Ayres is, you should check out the official and unofficial versions of her resumé. Both are offered here, for the same reason mug shots offer full-face and profile photos. We'll leave it to you to decide which is more accurate.

OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY

Elizabeth Ayres is a poet and essayist with a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where she was the Cornelia Ward Fellow and where she co-founded, with Julia Alvarez and Mary Gordon, the Women Writers’ Workshop.

She is the author of two books, Writing the Wave: Inspired Rides for Aspiring Writers and Know the Way (poetry), and two Sounds True audio albums, the Ultimate Creative Writing Workshop and Creative Writing for Beginners. She is now working on her third book, a collection of essays entitled American Dreamscape: Reflections from Chesapeake Bay Country.

Elizabeth has published poetry in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including Hanging Loose, Malahat Review, Worcester Review and Van Gogh’s Ear (with Norman Mailer, John Updike, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, et alia). She writes essays regularly for the Annapolis newspaper Bay Weekly, and her column, Soundings, appears monthly in Maryland's newspaper The Enterprise. She's received commissions to create new poems, and has performed her work in venues as diverse as The Library of Congress and New York City's Telephone Bar.

Elizabeth has a well-deserved international reputation as a creative writing teacher. The groundbreaking writing techniques in her book, Writing the Wave, have been hailed by New York Magazine, Newsday, The Voice of America, WBAI, Library Journal, The Village Voice, The Woodstock Times and the Taos News.

Elizabeth has appeared on The Joey Reynolds Show, The Tom Pope Show, Bill Thompson's Eye on Books, WXRK's Sunday Magazine, WOR's America in the Morning, WFUV, WPAT, WBAI and other radio and TV shows. She's taught creative writing courses for over thirty years, at New York University and the College of New Rochelle, through Poets-in-the-Schools and Poets & Writers; in libraries, senior citizen centers and other public forums.

Elizabeth founded the Center for Creative Writing in 1990. In 2005, after 27 years in Manhattan and 5 years on a remote mesa in New Mexico, she returned home to St. Mary’s County, Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay, where she grew up.

UNOFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY

Elizabeth Ayres’ zig-zag life path is passion’s sizzling brand.

Zig. She wins a graduate assistantship in Creative Writing to Boston University (regretfully declined), a $2,000 ‘first prize in poetry’ from the National Society of Arts and Letters (gratefully accepted), then starts grad school at Syracuse University.

Zag. Elizabeth gets her degree, moves to New York City, gleans the usual number of publications in small hip magazines and anthologies, gives the usual number of readings around town (including the Library of Congress in 1973). She teaches poetry in schools, libraries, senior centers, prisons and a home for unwed mothers, because the world will be a better place when people are more creative.

Zig. In 1979, she’s offered a contract by the now-esteemed small press, Hanging Loose, for her autobiography-in-verse, Mariner, What For?

Zag. Elizabeth finds God and gets an epiphany: her autobiography is powerful, it’s unique, but it offers its readers nothing beyond the pain of a brutal childhood. There’s no hope in it, no consolation, no redeeming social value. She declines the book contract, losing her agent and all her literary friends.

Zig. Elizabeth embarks on a spiritual odyssey that takes her, in 1984, into a Ukrainian Catholic convent. While there, she conceives the idea for a school dedicated to the belief that the individual undergoes a personal metamorphosis when creating a work of art, which work then becomes leaven for social transformation.

Zag. Elizabeth leaves the convent. She founds the Elizabeth Ayres Center for Creative Writing in 1990, which is committed to establishing for beginning writers the conditions necessary for the creative spirit to flourish. It grows from 6 to over 1,000 in ten years.

Zig. Elizabeth burns out on teaching and administrative duties. In 2000, when Writing the Wave comes out, she develops an online writing workshop and moves to a remote mesa in New Mexico where she teaches on the internet and writes up a storm. She experiments with a memoir, a novel, prose poetry, flash fiction, searching for a form that will offer readers hope, consolation, and, yes, the promise of much needed social change.

Zag. Elizabeth has a major poem published in the international anthology Van Gogh’s Ear, along with Norman Mailer, John Updike, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Galway Kinnell, Yoko Ono and a whole slew of equally famous folks. In 2005, she moves back to southern Maryland, where she grew up. T.S. Eliot said it: "At the end of all our journeying, we will return to the place of departure and know it for the first time."

Zig. Elizabeth starts writing the AMERICAN DREAMSCAPE essays. They do what she’s always dreamed needed doing. These powerful, unique essays catalyze individual transformation in their readers and thereby give people hope for a tomorrow better than today.