Novelist and essayist Elizabeth Mosier logged 1,000 volunteer hours processing colonial-era artifacts at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park Archeology Laboratory to write Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home (New Rivers Press, 2019). A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, her nonfiction has been selected as notable in Best American Essays and appears widely in journals and newspapers including Cleaver, Creative Nonfiction, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Poets and Writers. She writes the “Intersections” column for the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin.

Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home

Researched over seven years spent processing colonial-era artifacts at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park Archeology Laboratory, Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home (New Rivers Press, 2019) uses archaeology as a framework to explore personal material including my mother’s memory loss, the layering of shared experience in creating family or community narratives, and the role that artifacts … Continue reading Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home

Articles, Essays, Reviews

Writers are archaeologists, digging, processing and repairing the glittering and inscrutable relics to find meaning in experience. As a seven-year volunteer technician at the Independence National Park Archaeology Lab, the stories of how personal objects come to form the archaeological record—the social processes that affect an artifact’s “taphonomy”—fascinate me. My literary interest extends to contemporary objects…

My Life As a Girl

“First-novelist Mosier authors a sharp-edged romance about an Arizona native hoping to reinvent herself when she goes “back East” to college. Entering Bryn Mawr, Jaime Cody wants to bury her recent past: the arrest of her father for embezzlement, her degrading waitress jobs and her fling with Buddy the “cowboy.” All goes well until Buddy…

Events

The best part of publishing a book is the conversation it inspires! I’ve so enjoyed touring and presenting Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home this spring, at public libraries and private Bryn Mawr Clubs, for audiences including the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Wilmington, DE, and The Quadrangle in Haverford, PA. I’ve spoken on writing through trauma at…

FAQ

Nathaniel Popkin asks me about my new book, Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home here. Interview with Curtis Smith here. I talk with Maribel Garcia at Book Club Babble here. * * * As a girl, I talked about being a veterinarian, a psychologist, even a professional softball player — I think because the paths to…

Contact

I have nearly thirty years of experience presenting to audiences from elementary school to adult, in a variety of settings including bookstores, book groups, libraries, writing festivals, continuing education programs, and schools including Bryn Mawr College, the University of the Arts Summer Institute, the Bennington College July Program, the Pennsylvania Young Writers’ Day program, and…