Elizabeth McCracken (born September 16, 1966) is an American author. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award.[1]
McCracken, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, graduated from Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts, earned a B.A. and M.A. in English from Boston University, an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, and an M.S. in Library Science from Drexel University. In 2008 and 2009, McCracken lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
McCracken is the daughter of the late Samuel McCracken, a professor at Boston University and an assistant to long-time BU president John Silber; and Natalie Jacobson McCracken, a retired editor-in-chief for development and alumni publications at BU.[2] She is married to the novelist Edward Carey. They have a son, August George Carey Harvey, and a daughter, Matilda Libby Mary Harvey; an earlier child died before birth, an experience that formed the basis of McCracken's memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination.
McCracken holds the James Michener Chair of Fiction of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.[3] She and her husband were previously on the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the sister of former PC World magazine editor-in-chief and founder of Technologizer.com Harry McCracken.
Ann Patchett, in an interview for Blackbird at Virginia Commonwealth University, mentions that Elizabeth McCracken is her editor, and is the only person to read her manuscripts as she is writing them.[4]
In 2014, she published her first collection of stories in 20 years: Thunderstruck & Other Stories. Among the nine stories is a tale about a successful documentary filmmaker who has to face a famous subject he manipulated and betrayed; one about a young scholar who is mourning his wife; and another about a grocery store manager who obsesses about a woman's disappearance. Sept 2014 in New York Times. Her short story, "Hungry", was long-listed for the 2015 Sunday Times Short Story Award, the largest prize in the world for a single short story.[5] On March 4, 2015, McCracken was named the winner of The Story Prize for Thunderstruck & Other Stories and received the top prize of $20,000.[6] Her short story "The Souvenir Museum", originally published in Harper's Magazine in January 2021, was one of the 20 short stories selected (by Andrew Sean Greer) for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2022.
