Elizabeth Cox began writing poetry in the late 1970s, and published poems in many literary magazines, and more recently in The Southern Review and The Atlantic Monthly. Her first story, “Land of Goshen,” was cited for excellence by Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Press. Two of her stories have been read on NPR, and another story, “The Third of July,” was selected for the 1994 O. Henry Award Collection. A collection of stories, Bargains in the Real World, was published by Random House. Another story “Old Court” was read at Symphony Space by Joan Allen.
In 1985 she won the North Carolina Fiction Award-Individual Artist Grant, and received a Massachusetts Arts Council Grant in 2000. She had Fellowships at Yaddo and MacDowell, and has also written essays for Ms. Magazine, Lears, North Carolina Magazine, and The Oxford American. Her novels include Familiar Ground (1984), The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love (1991), Night Talk (1997) and The Slow Moon (2006).
Cox taught creative writing at Duke University for seventeen years. She has also taught at the University of Michigan, Tufts University, Boston University, Bennington Low Residency Program and MIT. She now teaches at Wofford College in South Carolina. In 2011 she was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and awarded the Robert Penn Warren Award for fiction for her body of work.
