A native of El Paso, TX, Elisabeth Hedrick lives in San Antonio, where she explores the city and surrounding hill country with her partner and blended family. Elisabeth writes creative nonficiton and poetry inquiring into the intersections between spirituality and sexuality, nature and gender, and adventure and mothering. Her current memoir project, Rare Bird, follows the path of a young academic who becomes a mother and is shocked by the ways that the maternal wakes her into the presence of awareness. Through following a path of opening into authentic presence, to self and other and the sacred Other, she finds herself moving out of her Catholic faith and into love—with another mother. It is a story of waking up to see that rare bird that lands in your presence, demanding attention and awe, changing the way you experience the landscape that surrounds.
Elisabeth taught English Literature and Gender Studies for over a decade, as an instructor at Saint Louis University and the University of Texas at El Paso. More recently, she has been teaching in the IB Literature program at IDEA College Prep in San Antonio. Elisabeth has published academic essays on war literature, trauma, and teaching. Her creative nonfiction essay “Pilgrim, Mother” was a finalist in Talking Writing’s Writing and Faith contest. She has also published in Lucia journal and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. She takes great joy in experiencing the ways that teaching, mothering, writing, and loving inform and deepen one another.
Rare Bird 