Elizabeth Crook

Elizabeth Crook lived in Nacogdoches, Texas and then San Marcos, Texas with her parents and brother and sister until age seven when the family moved to Washington D.C., where her father was director of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA)  for Lyndon Johnson. Two years later her father was appointed Ambassador to Australia and the family moved to Canberra. When they returned to Texas Elizabeth attended public schools in San Marcos, graduating from San Marcos High School. She attended Baylor University for two years and graduated from Rice University in 1982. She has written six novels: The Raven’s Bride and Promised Lands, published by Doubleday and reissued by SMU Press as part of the Southwest Life and Letters series; The Night Journal, published by Viking/Penguin; Monday, Monday, published by Sarah Crichton Books, of Farrar, Straus and Giroux; The Which Way Tree, published by Little, Brown and Company and currently in development for film with Pantherdog LLC and Picturehouse, and The Madstone.  Elizabeth has written for periodicals such as Texas Monthly and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and is co-writer, with Stephen Harrigan, of the screenplay for The Which Way Tree. She has served on the council of the Texas Institute of Letters and the board of the Texas Book Festival, is a member of Women Writing the West and Western Writers of America, and was selected the honored writer for 2006 Texas Writers’ Month. Her first novel, The Raven’s Bride, was the 2006 Texas Reads: One Book One Texas selection. The Night Journal was awarded the 2007 Spur award for Best Long Novel of the West and the 2007 Willa Literary Award for Historical Fiction. Monday, Monday was awarded the 2015 Jesse H. Jones award for fiction and named a 2014 Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews. The Which Way Tree was named by The Texas Center for The Book at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission as their 2024 Texas Great Read Adult Selection “to represent the state’s literary landscape” at the National Book Festival. Her prose has been called “deftly rhythmic, often wry, and impeccably crafted” (Texas Monthly), “confident and lyrical” (Kirkus), her “words as carefully chosen as pearls on a matched necklace,” (USA Today) and holding “the sustained power of a drumbeat” (Houston Chronicle). Her various books have been described as “one of the most powerful anti-war statements,” (Houston Post, on Promised Lands);  and a “ripping adventure with a show-stopping finale” (Wall Street Journal, on The Which Way Tree.) The Madstone, “a wonderfully transporting tale of love in the Old West” (People) is described in the Houston Chron as “tender, violent, funny, and, like just about everything Crook writes, drenched in Texas history—not the mythological kind, but a deeply researched dive into largely forgotten details and dark corners.” In 2023 Elizabeth received the prestigious Texas Writer Award from the Texas Book Festival.

She currently lives in Austin with her family.