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Susan Gager Jackson Professor of Creative Writing

Liz Poliner, a self-described “craft nerd,” is, like all good teachers, a lifelong learner—humble before that which she has yet to discover.

During her decade-plus at Hollins, she has enriched creative writing students with new methods for breaking into the lock box of self-censorship, for strategic revision, and for conducting historical research.

Some of Liz’s many gifts to Hollins, in leadership and in teaching, include:

• Mentoring a passel of outstanding undergraduate honors theses,
• Leading consistently strong “workshop” and intermediate classes,
• Shepherding the creation of an additional graduate assistantship,
• Fielding essential 100-level and J-Term classes for her department,
• And yes…committee work, on the Graduate Academic Affairs Committee, Diversity Initiative Advisory Board, and others.

While serving as director of creative writing, Liz brought in a notably accomplished and diverse group of authors for campus visits. When COVID-19 first hit, she faced the particular challenges of overseeing the M.F.A. students’ comprehensive exams, which had to be quickly shifted online, while finishing out the admission process for the next cohort. She reinvented work assignments for graduate assistants and ensured that the reading series carried on successfully in the weird new realm called “Zoom.”

Liz has also done crucial work for Hollins in support of Jewish matters, both as a member of the Diversity Initiative Advisory Board and in persuasive conversations and memos behind the scenes, raising awareness of identities often overlooked.

Here’s what some of her former students have to say about Liz’s teaching:

KELLY COOK M.F.A. ’09: “Elizabeth Poliner changed my writing and my life. I cannot say enough good things about her ability to teach the impossible—and also do the impossible, for she is an excellent teacher and writer.”

LUCY MARCUS M.F.A. ’19: “I still remember the moment I realized the complexities I had overlooked in a published story we were analyzing. Liz asked the group a question. Then she had us reread a line of dialogue but did not tell us what it meant. She simply watched as we flipped frantically through the pages of the story and murmured, with shared awe, a collective understanding that Liz’s question had unlocked. Thank you, Liz, for your wisdom and contagious passion.”

APRIL WILDER M.F.A. ’15: “The ‘a-ha’ moments I experienced in Liz’s tutorial continue to impact my writing today. Liz sees to the heart of people’s motivations and desires, and how who we are is inextricable from how we interact with the world. The encouragement she has given me across the years (including after graduation) has been a buoy. I send her all my love and best wishes as she retires from Hollins.”

MEGHANA MYSORE M.F.A. ’22: “Liz puts so much energy into her teaching, and this energy was really needed for me in my first year in the Hollins M.F.A. program. She so clearly cared about my work and pushing it to reflect its greatest potential.”

Liz’s obsession with the craft of fiction has also benefited the writing community nationwide through a series of very well-received panels she’s organized for the annual conferences of her professional organization, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and through her published essays on other writers’ work.

But we can’t talk about Liz without talking about her as a literary artist: one whose creativity and diligence enrich a wider realm than just our campus. She’s an accomplished poet and writer of short stories, and she leaves us ready to dive into completing her much-anticipated third novel. So, we’ll close by telling you about the success of her second, As Close to Us as Breathing.

We could call this book “beautiful,” “exquisite,” and “the kind of novel you sink into blissfully,” but that would be plagiarizing from the rave review it got on NPR back in 2016! So we’ll steal from The New York Times instead. That reviewer wrote that Liz has “a keen eye for the awkwardness and sudden leaping insights of adolescents on the brink of adulthood,” and praised As Close to Us as Breathing as “a big-hearted roundelay of a novel that, among other things, performs the invaluable service of recovering a lost world.”

The novel was translated into German and also got good reviews abroad. Here in the U.S., it received the Janet Heidinger Kafka prize, an award previously won by such luminaries as Toni Morrison and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Achievements like this, not to mention her public readings and book club visits around the country, redound to Hollins’ reputation. They also exemplify the breadth and depth of vision, the inspired imagination, and the acute insights of our remarkable colleague, Elizabeth Poliner.

Well done, Liz! Thank you—and keep writing!

Cathryn Hankla ’80, M.A. ’82, professor of English emerita, and Jeanne Larsen M.A. ’72, professor of English emerita