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. Currently, she teaches at Shengda College just outside of Zhengzhou (which is only a small city by Chinese standards).
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.