Elizabeth Benedict is a novelist, essayist, editor, and creative writing teacher. Her novels include the bestseller Almost, the National Book Award finalist Slow Dancing, and her most recent, The Practice of Deceit, which the Boston Globecalled "a wickedly funny literary suspense novel." In the Chicago Tribune, Anne Tyler praised her second novel, The Beginner's Book of Dreams, for "the world it spreads before us," which is "complex, fascinating, bewildering, sometimes morbidly funny, always unlaid with pain. The marvel is that such a sad book could be such a joy to read." Benedict's essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the Rumpus, Esquire, Allure, Harper's Bazaar, Salmagundi, and D æ dalus. She is the editor of two anthologies: Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, and the New York Timesbestseller What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most.
Benedict has taught creative writing at Princeton, Columbia, Swarthmore, Massachussets Institute of Technology, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She teaches every summer at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore, and works year round as a writing coach and editor. Learn more about Benedict and her work at elizabethbenedict.com and DontSweatTheEssay.com.