About

Elizabeth Marian Charles is a writer, teacher, and mother. She holds a BA in English from Seattle University and an MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University. She was a recipient of the 2017 Piper Global Writing Residency Fellowship in Singapore and Hong Kong, and the 2018 Piper Global Teaching Fellowship at the National University of Singapore. Her college-level teaching work includes first year composition and rhetoric, professional and technical writing, introductory fiction, and intermediate fiction. Additional professional experience includes web marketing and communications and freelance editing. She currently teaches first year composition and professional and technical writing at University of South Florida and is also a Ph.D. student in English Rhetoric and Composition. She is a member of the academic board of the Museum of Motherhood. She is working on a memoir about the life-threatening miscarriage that revealed how she had learned to distrust her body and abandon her desires, set against the reproductive politics of Texas.

Publications

Memoir: MOTHER OF PEARL

Set against the backdrop of the reproductive politics of Texas, MOTHER OF PEARL is the story of a life-threatening miscarriage that revealed how I had learned to distrust my body and abandon my desires.

I was 14 weeks pregnant as a stay-at-home military spouse in small-town Texas when I learned my pregnancy was nonviable. Within 24 hours I hemorrhaged over 40% of my blood volume, a medical crisis that ended with emergency surgery and a blood transfusion. The loss forced me to reckon with years of health crises, including an eating disorder as a teenager, my father's death from brain cancer, and the birth of my son during the pandemic. When I realized Texas’s restrictive laws may have affected my treatment, I blamed the broken healthcare system. However, I had abandoned myself years before, a pattern replicated across the religious upbringing that estranged me from my body, my relationship with my brilliant father, and my uncritical acceptance of the self-sacrificing myths of motherhood. I moved to Florida and returned to teaching but was haunted by flashbacks and panic attacks. As I rebuilt a life rooted in agency, I realized every crisis was a cosmic course correction bringing me back to the truth of my body and pointing me toward my greatest desires. But would I risk it all to get pregnant again, or learn to follow my embodied intuition when the next crisis struck?

Blending personal narrative, cultural analysis, and myth, MOTHER OF PEARL examines how women are conditioned to ignore their body, suppress their intuition, and defer to authority. Driven by the urgency of the miscarriage and layered with converging timelines from the past, it is a literary memoir for women who have spent their lives living from the neck up. It combines the heart-forward intellect of Leslie Jamison’s Splinters with the mythic sensibility of Sophie Strand’s The Body is a Doorway, scored by the witchy vibes of Florence + the Machine’s latest album, Everybody Scream. It fills a vital cultural gap, speaking to the estimated one million women annually navigating pregnancy loss in a post-Roe America, and asks: When your life falls apart, who are you being asked to become?

I am currently seeking representation for MOTHER OF PEARL.

Conferences and Presentations:

  • Museum of Motherhood Conference, Presenter and Panel Organizer (2026): “Community Models of Reproductive Care: Reproductive Identity & Decision Making”

  • NeMLA, Presenter (2026): “This Was a Desired Pregnancy: Writing Miscarriage Post-Dobbs” on Navigating Trauma Through Narrative Medicine (Part 1): Gender, Reproduction, and Care (Roundtable)

  • Museum of Motherhood Conference, Presenter (2025): “Framing Pregnancy Loss as Transformation: A Narrative Approach”

  • 13th Annual Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) Research Colloquium, Presenter (2024): “Background Research for a Proposed Study on Writing Reproductive Trauma”

  • Museum of Motherhood Conference: Threads of Connection, Presenter (2024): “Thirdspace Feminist Practices for Embodying Motherhood in Academia”

  • Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writing Conference, Presenter (2019): “Demystifying the Creative Process: Rituals, Self-Care, and Habits for Writers” craft lecture & discussion

  • ASU MFA Reading Series Co-Organizer (2017-2018): Co-organized an 8-part reading series featuring ASU graduate students

  • Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writing Conference, Panel Moderator (2018): “Re-Visioning: Revising the Manuscript” with Claire Vaye Watkins, Kevin McIlroy, and Alix Ohlin

  • Writers’ Craft: An ASU Conference on Craft and Community, Presenter (2018): “Dialogue: The Art of Talking on the Page” fiction craft lecture

  • Writers’ Craft: An ASU Conference on Craft and Community, Co-Presenter (2017): “On Beginnings” fiction craft lecture co-presented with Annie Vitalsey

Community Involvement:

  • Academic Board Member, Museum of Motherhood, 2023-present

Awards, Acknowledgments, and Fellowships

  • Winner, 2019 Inception Contest by Sunspot Lit

  • Honorable Mention, 2019 Annual Woven Tale Press Literary competition (judged by Ann Beattie)

  • Finalist, 2019 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize (judged by Elizabeth McCracken)

  • Finalist, 2018 Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Award

  • 2018 Piper Global Teaching Fellowship in Singapore

  • 2017 Piper Global Writing Residency Fellowship in Singapore and Hong Kong

  • Semifinalist, 2016 Disquiet Literary Contest