Born
in 1980, on a rainy day in Seattle, Elizabeth Kate Switaj grew up in
the Pacific Northwest. When she was in preschool and kindergarten,
her family lived in a gray-blue house in Coburg, Oregon, a small town
near Eugene. The rest of her childhood was spent living in apartments
in the Seattle area. Summers meant sessions at Vashon Island's Camp
Sealth (eventually, she became a counselor there, taking on the name
of Slug Lady) and family camping trips in the San Juan Islands.
Later, she volunteered to help build trails through various local
greenways. These landscapes still influence the vocabulary and
imagery of her writing.
Thanks to Washington state's Running Start program, she was able
to complete her AAS at the same time that she earned her high school
diploma. She finished her last two years of undergrad at The
Evergreen State College and remained in Olympia for two years
after that. During this time, she ran The Part-Time Postmodernist, a
literary webzine.
In 2001, she moved to San Francisco to attend the poetics program
at New College of California.
While there, she participated in numerous antiwar protests and was
arrested more than once for civil disobedience.
After
completing her MFA early in 2004, she moved to Japan. She spent her
first year the teaching at a private conversation school about a half
hour away from Nagoya. For her second year, she moved north to the
city where Japan's first university was opened, Ashikaga, one hour
north of Tokyo. There, she taught in two elementary schools, as well
as in the preschool for an English immersion school in the next town
(and prefecture) over.
When she returned to the US, she spent a miserable eleven months
living in Brooklyn, which was ended with a decision to move to China.
She taught at Shengda College just outside of Zhengzhou (which is
only a small city by Chinese standards) until, on a trip to Cambodia
in the summer of 2008, she was robbed at knifepoint. Among the items
stolen were her passport, and she was unable to get a new Chinese
visa without first returning to the US.
Instead of returning to China, she went back to the Seattle where
she remained for a year working on her writing and substituting at an
ESL school.
Currently, she is researching James Joyce at Queen's University
Belfast.
Each place she has moved has added a new layer and richness to her
poetics, as well as presenting her with new material to photograph.
Born
in 1980, on a rainy day in Seattle, Elizabeth Kate Switaj grew up in
the Pacific Northwest. When she was in preschool and kindergarten,
her family lived in a gray-blue house in Coburg, Oregon, a small town
near Eugene. The rest of her childhood was spent living in apartments
in the Seattle area. Summers meant sessions at Vashon Island's Camp
Sealth (eventually, she became a counselor there, taking on the name
of Slug Lady) and family camping trips in the San Juan Islands.
Later, she volunteered to help build trails through various local
greenways. These landscapes still influence the vocabulary and
imagery of her writing.
After
completing her MFA early in 2004, she moved to Japan. She spent her
first year the teaching at a private conversation school about a half
hour away from Nagoya. For her second year, she moved north to the
city where Japan's first university was opened, Ashikaga, one hour
north of Tokyo. There, she taught in two elementary schools, as well
as in the preschool for an English immersion school in the next town
(and prefecture) over.