Elizabeth Dodd was born in Boulder, Colorado, and grew up in Athens, Ohio. She graduated summa cum laude from Ohio University in 1983, with a double major in English and French. Upon graduation, she moved to Bloomington, Indiana to attend graduate school and received both an MFA in poetry and a PhD in literature and edited the literary journal, Indiana Review.

In 1989, Dodd joined Kansas State University as a distinguished professor where she teaches creative writing in both poetry and nonfiction (as well as additional courses in literature and women's studies.)

• Abolonia Twitt and the Toasted Cheese Sandwich (Xlibris, 2016)
• Horizon's Lens: My Time on the Turning World (University of Nebraska Press, 2012)
  
• In the Mind's Eye: Essays across the Animate World (University of Nebraska Press, 2008)
  
• Prospect: Journeys & Landscapes (University of Utah Press, 2003)
  
• Archetypal Light (University of Nevada Press, 2001)
• Fire and Form on the Konza Prairie (Prairie Light Studio Publishing, 2012)
  
• Like Memory, Caverns (New York University Press, 1992)
  
• The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet (University of Missouri, 1992)

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In the Dream I Am

1. MUSEUM PIECE
Fremont figurines lie in
orderly rows, limbs and torsos
fused in the indistinct

articulation of their bodies.
But the faces -
"shuttered eyes," the plaque describes

Vacant sockets
gaze through
thing palings of clay.

Think of Emiy Dickinson,
eyes locked with God's,
measuring deserts in his clemency.

11. AFTER THE ICE STORM
For days the landscape
glittered, terrible clarity
coating each tree limb,
each shrub.

The pines were marbled,
fingers no one could touch.

Last night, all night
ice fell from the house,
the trees, loosened
by yesterday's sun.
and the wind's late return.

I woke to the atonal
music of change, tiny crashes
and thuds, the bodies
casting off stasis.

111. IN THE DREAM I AM
at the edge
of a river, squatting amid summer's
thick bracken and sumac.

I have been counseled
to dig, so i'm lifting up
fistfuls of loose dirt, weeping,
uncovering bones.

They rise slowly,
like half-waterlogged wood.

Yes, says the voice,
very good, as I hold a perfect
tibula, smooth as the dark
current's surface.

Later, i will try to tell
of the masks I saw, the faces dressed
in pigment and bone. Imagine
a skull as pliant
as pie dough, smoothed
over the ruthless planes of the face.

We can't get away, we can't
even find each other in the dark.

Someone is turning, slowly, to look.

---from Archetypal Light

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• Two: Kansas Arts Commision Master Fellowships in Poetry
  
• Elmer Holmes Bobst Emerging Writer Award
  
• William Rockhill Nelson Best Nonfiction Book Award
  
• The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Best Book Award
  
• McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonfiction

Her work has been cited in Best American Essays.

An interview of Elizabeth Dodd, conducted by Hutchinson Poet William Sheldon

• Elizabeth's Website
• K-State Page
• Campus Reports
• Terrain