"The Spirit lurks within the Flesh,
Like Tides within the Sea
That make the Water live, estranged
What would the Either be?"
- Emily Dickinson
"No interpreter is
needed
for a conversation between bodies."
- Stanley Kunitz
Elizabeth Austen is a Seattle-based poet, performer and teacher.
Through
my early
thirties, I worked as an actor, vocal coach and director with companies
including Book-It Repertory Theatre, On the Boards and the Seattle
Shakespeare Festival, as well as companies in Michigan, Montana, New Jersey
and London, England. I trained as a classical actor and vocal coach at
Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and studied history,
literature and philosophy at University College, London.
After six months’ solo travel in the Andes region of South America, I redirected my creative energies to writing poetry. Poet Alexandra Thurman describes my poems as offering "meditations, both discursive and lyrical, on the intersection between the political, the spiritual, and the sacraments of the everyday."
You'll find my poems in the anthologies Poets Against the War, Pontoon, Weathered Pages and in the Bellingham Review, DMQ Review, Swivel, and the South African journal Carapace, among others. I've performed at Pacific Northwest venues including the Bumbershoot Arts Festival, Seattle Poetry Festival and the Skagit River Poetry Festival. I've received fellowships from Jack Straw Productions and Hedgebrook, funding from 4Culture, and my poems have been nominated for a Pushcart prize.
My audio CD, skin prayers, includes 26 poems from the as-yet-unpublished full-length manuscript of the same name.
For the past six years I've produced literary programming for KUOW 94.9, one of Seattle’s NPR affiliates. Tune in to "Sound Focus" on Monday afternoons at 2 p.m. to hear commentaries on readings by local and national authors. You'll find links to recent segments on the On the Air page, or you can find them on KUOW's Web site, www.kuow.org.
I earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch University-Los Angeles in 2001,
and have taught for several years in the “Inquiry Through Writing” program at
Richard Hugo House,
a literary arts center in Seattle. I've been a visiting artist for the
Anacortes, La Conner, Mount Vernon, Seattle and Sedro Woolley, Washington school
districts, and for the Austin, Texas
ArtSpark Festival. I've led
workshops for
Burning Word, Highline Community College, Poets in the Park, Puget Sound
Writers Program and the Washington Center for the Book. I teach
“Reading to Sustain Your Writing Life” privately in the Seattle area, and earn
my living as a senior communications specialist at Children’s
Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle.
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