Bio

Writer/Naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield’s (she/her) books are SOFAR (forthcoming in August), which includes poems that were published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Sun, and Orion; Toward Antarctica; Once Removed; Approaching Ice, which was a finalist from the James Laughlin award from the Academy of American Poets; Interpretive Work, which won the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry; and the anthologies Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, co-created with CMarie Fuhrman and Derek Sheffield and winner of the 2024 Pacific Northwest Book Award and Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, co-created with Alexandra Teague and Miller Oberman. Her poems have appeared in The Slowdown, The New Yorker, Poetry and her honors include a Stegner Fellowship and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant. Liz works as a naturalist and field assistant at home on Cape Cod, teaches creative writing at Brandeis University, and is Editor-in-Chief of Broadsided.

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(2020: Lisa Sette)

As an Editor: Broadsided & Cascadia

In 2005, Bradfield founded Broadsided (broadsidedpress.org), an innovative grassroots-distributed digital broadside publishing project that publishes twice-yearly folios of original collaborations between writers and visual artists. Broadsided's mission is to help people put literature and art into public spaces in their communities. In 2021, Broadsided published an anthology of 50 of its best collaborations and conversations. Read more here.

With Derek Sheffield and CMarie Fuhrman, Bradfield brought together her love of home-place and her love of poetry to create Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, published by Mountaineers Books in March 2023. Writing the being stories that anchor each entry of this anthology was a labor of love for Liz and her co-editors. Cascadia Field Guide won a Pacific Northwest Book Award, a ForeWord Indies Gold Award, and other honors. Read more here.

As a Naturalist

Since the 1990s, Liz has worked as a naturalist and marine educator. It all started with a love of boats and a long stint as a deckhand on small ecotour ships along the Pacific Coast, from Alaska to Baja (or did it start in her Puget Sound/Salish Sea childhood?). She spent two decades working as an expedition guide on small ships in the high latitudes (Alaska, the Antlantic Arctic, and Antarctica), work she left in the pandemic. These days, she leads local naturalist workshops and whale watches from Cape Cod's outer reaches and helps with marine mammal field work at home.

Early Days/ Sense of Place

Liz grew up in Tacoma, Washington with a water-focused family that spent a lot of time in the Salish Sea. She began her college education at the University of Oregon and graduated from the University of Washington with degrees in English and Women's Studies (she wanted to double with zoology... but that's another story).

After her deckhand gig (see above), Liz worked for a .com startup in Port Townsend, then moved east to Provincetown, Massachusetts--a place she'd never dreamed of but fell hard for once she washed ashore. She boomeranged west for five years to Alaska, living in Anchorage and earning her MFA in a place that keeps luring her back. She makes her home now on Cape Cod in the wilds of Truro.

All of these places deeply inform Liz's sense of the world. She'd like to claim them all (plus a few others) as critical to her home-sense.

Elizabeth Bradfield: Writer & Naturalist

Elizabeth Bradfield: Writer & Naturalist

Bio

As an Editor: Broadsided & Cascadia

As a Naturalist

Early Days/ Sense of Place