Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop was born and raised in New York City. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2001 with a B.A. in English and American Literature and Language. In 2004 she received her M.F.A. in fiction from the University of California at Irvine, where she was the recipient of the Schaeffer Writing Fellowship for the 2004–5 academic year. She is the author of the novels Fireworks (Knopf, 2006) and December (Knopf, 2008), and has published stories in Wind, the Evansville Review, the Missouri Review, Red Rock Review and the Indiana Review. Currently, she is living and writing in Savannah, Georgia.