Elizabeth Bear - Life and Career

Life and Career

Bear is of Ukrainian and Swedish ancestry.

A native of Hartford, Connecticut, her curriculum vitae includes working as a "media industry professional," a stablehand, a fluff-page reporter, a maintainer of Microbiology procedure manuals for a 1,000-bed inner-city hospital, a typesetter and layout editor, a traffic manager for an import-export business, Emmanuel Labour, and "the girl who makes the donuts at The Whole Donut at three A.M."

She lived in Las Vegas, Nevada for some time (the setting for the short stories "One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King", "Follow Me Light", and "This Tragic Glass"), but she returned to Connecticut in January 2006.

Her first novel Hammered was published in January 2005 and was followed by Scardown in July and Worldwired in November of the same year. The trilogy features Canadian Master Warrant Officer Jenny Casey, who is also the main character in the short story "Gone to Flowers". Hammered won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2006.

The Chains That You Refuse, a collection of her short fiction, was published May 2006 by Night Shade Books. Blood and Iron, the first book in the fantasy series entitled "The Promethean Age", debuted June 27, 2006. She is also a coauthor of the ongoing Shadow Unit website/pseudo-TV series.

In 2008, she donated her archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.

She is an instructor at the Viable Paradise writer's workshop and has taught at Clarion West Writers Workshop.

The opening quote in Criminal Minds episode "Lauren" (6.18) was a direct quote of the second and third lines of Bear's book Seven for a Secret: "The secret to lying is to believe with all your heart. That goes for lying to yourself even more than lying to another."