Elizabeth Hazen is a poet and essayist. A Maryland native, she came of age in a suburb of Washington, D.C. in the pre-internet, grunge-tinted 1990s, when women were riding the third wave of feminism and fighting the accompanying backlash. She began writing poems when she was in middle school, after a kind-hearted librarian handed her Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind. She has been reading and writing poetry ever since. For twenty years she taught high school and middle school English. Currently she works at an independent bookstore.
Hazen’s poems and essays explore issues of addiction, mental health, and sexual trauma, as well as the restorative power of love and forgiveness. The question of identity – specifically female identity – is also intrinsic to her work. She asks: Who am I? Where (if anywhere) do I belong? Why am I here? These existential questions take on a new urgency in her forthcoming third collection, The Sky Will Hold, which reckons with aging, family dynamics, and the challenges of helping the next generation navigate a world that so often fails to offer much in the way of hope and, furthermore, a world that is literally becoming less and less inhabitable.
Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Epoch, Fourth Genre, Grist, The Common, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. Alan Squire Publishing released Chaos Theories, in 2016 and Girls Like Us in 2020. The Sky Will Hold is forthcoming from ASP in March 2025. She lives in Baltimore with her family.