About Elizabeth Enslin
Elizabeth Enslin, author of While the Gods Were
Sleeping: A Journey Through Love and Rebellion in Nepal,
grew up in Seattle and went on to earn her PhD in cultural
anthropology from Stanford University in 1990. While a graduate
student, she married into a Brahman family in the plains of Nepal.
Inspired by local women, especially her mother-in-law, she
researched women's organizing, poetics, politics, and agroecology.
Her academic essay, "Beyond Writing: Feminist Practice and the
Limits of Ethnography," still inspires conversations about
feminism and the ethics of research and activism. Enslin returned to the Pacific Northwest in 1995 and earned her
living as a high school and college teacher, a grant writer, and
an independent consultant. She has published creative nonfiction
and poetry in The Gettysburg Review, Crab Orchard Review, The
High Desert Journal, The Raven Chronicles, Opium Magazine,
and In Posse Review and received an Individual Artist
Fellowship Award from the Oregon Arts Commission and an honorable
mention for the Pushcart Prize. She currently lives in a strawbale house in the canyon country
of northeastern Oregon, where she raises garlic, pigs, and yaks. While the Gods Were Sleeping is her first book.
For more information, view Elizabeth Enslin's Web site.