Elizabeth Kadetsky is the author of First There Is a Mountain, a reported memoir about her time working with the yogi BKS Iyengar in India and studying the history of modern yoga (Little Brown and Dzanc, 2019); two volumes of fiction including the CLMP finalist for best new fiction On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World (Nouvella, 2014); and a lyric memoir, The Memory Eaters, winner of the Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction in 2020.
Her short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and two Best American Short Stories notable citations, and her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Santa Monica Review, Antioch Review, and elsewhere. Her prominent work in journalism comes from her covering Latin America, immigration, and gender in the 1990s, where she published a lot of immersive pieces in Ms. Magazine, Self, Glamour, The Nation, The Village Voice, and more.
She has been a fellow at Camargo Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Ucross Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the St. James Centre for Creativity in Malta, MacDowell, and many other creative writing residency programs. She was a Margaret Bridgman scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as a three-time Fulbright scholar to India. Kadestky was awarded a Public Scholars fellowship from the NEH for 2025-2026.
Kadestsky worked as a freelance copy editor for Details, Rolling Stone, Elle, and New York Magazine, until she got her first teaching job at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2001. Since then, she has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and University of Pittsburgh. Currently, Kadetsky is the nonfiction editor at New England Review and professor of English and creative writing at Penn State University.
At MacDowell in 2005, Kadetsky assembled and wrote much of a new collection of short stories tentatively titled The Parallel of Wishful Thinking. In 2006, she began work on a novel.
