Liz Harmer is a Canadian writer, editor & teacher living in California.

Her second novel, Strange Loops, a “propulsive, darkly gripping novel about the power and paradoxes of human longing, faith, trauma, and taboo” was released with Knopf Canada in 2023. Her first novel, The Amateurs, a speculative novel of technological rapture, came out in 2018. After receiving starred reviews in PW and Q&Q, The Amateurs was a finalist with the Amazon First Novel Award.

Her stories, essays, and poems have been published widely. In 2019 she was a Bread Loaf fellow and the runner-up to the Mitchell Prize in Poetry. The winner of a National Magazine Award in Personal Journalism, she has also been included in the Best Canadian Stories 2018, a finalist for the Journey Prize, and shortlisted for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

Liz writes about desire, madness, motherhood, and religion and is at work on an award-winning memoir of mental illness and a new novel, both of which have received support from Canada Council for the arts.

She currently teaches in the Creative Writing BFA/MFA program at Chapman University.

A warm, dynamic speaker, Liz is available for interviews, book chats and lectures, as well as to do one-on-one coaching, manuscript consultation, and copyediting.