Elizabeth Colen, MFA

she/they, Senior Instructor

Office

Location

HU 259

Hours

Please email instructor to arrange appointment.

Contact

Email

Elizabeth.Colen@wwu.edu

Phone

(360) 650-4669

Website

Personal Website

About

EJ Colen is a queer PNW-based educator, writer, editor, and visual artist whose research and teaching interests include experimental writing and hybrid genres, queer literature, apocalyptic narratives, long-form poetry, the lyric essay, literary and visual collage, the physical embodiment of art practices, and research-based approaches to storytelling and memoir. She is the author of What Weaponry, a novel in prose poems, poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Lambda Literary Award and Audre Lorde Award finalist) and Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies, flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, book-length lyric essay The Green Condition, and fiction collaboration True Ash.

Her personal essays are anthologized in Pie & Whiskey, a New York Times New & Notable Book, Devouring the Green: Poetics in an Era of Catastrophic Change, and Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis. And her essay "Under the Shadows" was on the notable list for Best American Essays of 2023. With more than two decades of social justice activism, EJ remains committed to centering marginalized voices in all the work that she does. Nonfiction editor at Tupelo Press, book reviewer for the American Book Review, and freelance editor and manuscript consultant, she is a member of the Kulshan Academy for Queer Artists and teaches in the English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Departments at Western Washington University.