Elizabeth Garber

Elizabeth W. Garber is the author of Sailing at the Edge of Disaster: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Daring Year (Toad Hall Editions 2022), a coming of age adventure tale. Her book, Implosion: A Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter (She Writes Press 2018), focuses on a family caught in a collision between modern architecture, radical social change, and mental illness in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s in Cincinnati, Ohio. Elizabeth is the author of three books of poetry: True Affections: Poems from a Small Town (2012), Listening Inside the Dance (2005), and Pierced by the Seasons (2004). Three of her poems were read on NPR on The Writer’s Almanac. Her poems were included in two anthologies of Maine Poets, Take Heart: Poems from Maine, and More Poems from Maine. She was interviewed and filmed for a website showcasing twenty Maine Poets.

She collaborated with painter/photographer Michael Weymouth, combining her poetry and essays with his paintings and photographs to create a coffee table style book Maine (Island Time 2013). This book won the Maine Writers and Publishers Literary Prize in 2014 for Excellence in Publishing. While working on her memoir, Implosion, she was awarded two writing fellowships at Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Jentel Artist Residency Program in Wyoming.

As the 2006 Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, she coordinated monthly poetry readings, and wrote a weekly poetry column published in three mid-coast papers highlighting Maine poets. She is the founder of the Illuminated Sea Press, encouraging the independent publishing of fine Maine poets. She was co-organizer of the Belfast Poetry Festival and Poetry and Art Walk for seven years, encouraging the collaboration of artists and poets. An hour-long community television program, a Visit with Poet Laureate Elizabeth Garber, can be seen on Vimeo.

Garber studied Greek Epic in the Mythology and Folklore Department at Harvard, received a BA from Johns Hopkins, a MFA in creative non-fiction from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Masters Program, and a Masters in Acupuncture from the Traditional Acupuncture Institute. She has maintained a private practice as an acupuncturist for nearly forty years in mid-coast Maine, where she raised her family.