Elizabeth L Silver

Elizabeth L Silver is the founder and director of Onward, and the author of the forthcoming novel, The Majority (Riverhead, 2023), the memoir, The Tincture of Time: A Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty (Penguin Press, 2017), and the novel, The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (Crown, 2013). Her work has been called “important” by The Los Angeles Times, “fantastic” by The Washington Post, and “masterful” by The Wall Street Journal, has been published in seven languages, and optioned for film.

Elizabeth has been featured on PBS NewsHour and NPR, and her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, New York Magazine, McSweeney’s, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review, The Millions, The Dallas Morning News, among other publications. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, the MA program in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in England, and Temple University Beasley School of Law, Elizabeth has taught English as a Second Language in Costa Rica, writing and literature at Drexel University and St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and worked as an attorney in California and Texas. Her legal pro bono work includes working on asylum cases at the Texas-Mexico border and with survivors of domestic violence in Los Angeles.

She has served as a judge in nonfiction for the PEN Center Literary Awards, UCLA’s James Kirkwood Literary Prize in fiction, AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize, served as a PEN in the Community Teaching Artist, and a mentor in Fiction for AWP‘s Writer-to-Writer Program. A recipient of fellowships and residencies from Ragdale, Ucross, and the British Centre for Literary Translation, she lives in Los Angeles with her family, where she teaches creative writing with UCLA Writers’ Program, and runs Onward.

Elizabeth can be found at ElizabethLSilver.com.

Charitable Organization: American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

Praise

“[Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s] legend lives on, most recently in Elizabeth Silver’s new novel The Majority. It’s RBG-esque protagnist, Sylvia Olin Bernstein, 83, considers her life as she looks back to her decades on the highest court. . .stealthily devastating . . . [an] important novel.”
—The Los Angeles Times

“A delicate weave of cultural analysis, personal history, and religious teachings in a meditation on the limits of science and the boundless capacity of the human heart.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“Bracing and combative… a classic slow-burn, with Ms. Silver spinning the web…and masterfully revealing the threads that connect [the characters] to each other and to the crime…The novel proceeds to its heart-wrenching conclusion by a series of feints and betrayals that would make Gillian Flynn stand and applaud.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“I have been reviewing books professionally since 1976, and reading adult fiction since 1964. Through those decades, I cannot recall a debut novel written more skillfully than The Execution of Noa P. Singleton.”
—Dallas Morning News