Bio

Writer/naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Toward Antarctica, Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work, and Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro. She has co-edited the anthologies Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020 (with Alexandra Teague and Miller Oberman) and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology and Poetry (with CMarie Fuhrman and Derek Sheffield).

Her poems and essays have appeared in The Sun, New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Orion and have been widely anthologized. Winner of the Audre Lorde Prize from the Publishing Triangle, finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, her honors also include a Stegner Fellowship and a Bread Loaf Scholarship.

Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided, she lives on Cape Cod, teaches creative writing at Brandeis University, and balances her work as a writer with work as a naturalist/field assistant at home and afar.

Get book covers, bio photos here

(2020: Lisa Sette)

As an Editor: Broadsided & Cascadia

In 2005, Bradfield founded Broadsided (broadsidedpress.org), an innovative grassroots-distributed digital broadside publishing project. Broadsided's mission is to help people put literature and art into public spaces in their communities. In addition to the ongoing publications there, 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.

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?). These days, she leads local naturalist workshops and whale watches from Cape Cod's outer reaches, spends time every year as a naturalist/guide in remote locations (most often in the high latitudes), and helps with marine mammal field work at home on a few projects.

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 then 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