End of the Point (Graver)

Author Bio
• Birth—1964
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Raised—Williamstwn, Massachusetts
• Education—B.A., Weslyan University;
   M.F.A., Washington University in St. Louis
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts


Elizabeth Graver is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. She was  born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She received her B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1986, and her M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1999. She also did graduate work at Cornell University.

A recipient of fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts, she has been a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Boston College since 1993. Married to civil rights lawyer James Pingeon, Graver is the mother of two daughters.

Graver writes character-driven psychological fiction set in a wide variety of times and places, as well as more experimental short fiction, and non-fiction essays on a variety of subjects. Her 2013 novel, The End of the Point, is set in a summer community on the coast of Massachusetts from 1942 through 1999 and is a layered meditation on place and family across half a century.

Her first novel Unravelling, published in 1999, is set in 19th-century America in the Lowell textile mills and tells the story of a fiercely independent young woman and the life she eventually fashions for herself. The Honey Thief of 2000, a contemporary novel, explores a mother/daughter relationship, as well as the fall-out of living with—and losing—a mentally ill father. Her 2005 novel In Awake uses the genetic disease Xeroderma Pigmentosum to explore a mother's relationships with her sons, her husband and, eventually, her lover; the novel is set at a camp for children with this rare disease. A Chicago Tribune review called Graver "one of our finest writers on the grand drama of simply growing up."

Awards

• 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, for Have You Seen Me?
• 1991 Cohen Prize from Ploughshares Magazine, for “The Mourning Door”
• 1991 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
• 1992 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
• 1997, 2009, 2011, 2012 MacDowell Colony Fellowships  (Author bio from Wikipedia.)