Elizabeth Ayres 

The official and unofficial versions of Elizabeth's resumé are offered here for the same reason mug shots offer full-face and profile photos.

OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY

Elizabeth Ayres is an award-winning 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 three books, Invitation to Wonder:  A Journey through the Seasons, Writing the Wave: Inspired Rides for Aspiring Writers and Know the Way (poetry).  Her two Sounds True audio albums are:  The Ultimate Creative Writing Workshop and Creative Writing for Beginners. Her five-album Invitation to Wonder audio series is published by Veriditas Books, and Elizabeth is currently working on Memoir of a Quest for the Cosmic Christ.

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). A regular columnist in several Maryland newspapers, Elizabeth has 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 New York City 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.  She now shares the beauty, wisdom and mystery of her homeland through creative writing retreats, for groups and individuals in a space devoted to evolution through creativity.

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 realizes that what the world needs now is more people claiming their full birthright of creativity.

Zag. Elizabeth leaves the convent. She founds the Elizabeth Ayres Center for Creative Writing in 1990, which is committed to cultural transformation by establishing for beginning writers the conditions necessary for the creative spirit to flourish. The Center grows from 6 to over 1,000 in ten years, and the world must be a better place since more people are more creative!

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 writes INVITATION TO WONDER.  It does 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.  Click here to read a few.

Zag.  Elizabeth is now working on MEMOIR OF A QUEST FOR THE COSMIC CHRIST, because?  The world will be a better place when more people realize they are the creative, fecund heart of the Universe's transformational impulse.