Spencer, Elizabeth, 1921-....

Writer Elizabeth Spencer was born in 1921 in Carrollton, Miss. Spencer married John Rusher in 1956 and was sometimes known as Elizabeth Rusher among friends and family. Spencer taught writing at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, 1976-1986, and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1986-1992.

Writer Elizabeth Spencer was born in 1921, in Carrollton, Miss., to James Luther Spencer and Mary James McCain Spencer. Spencer graduated from Belhaven College in Jackson, Miss., in 1942. She went on to receive a Master of Arts degree in English from Vanderbilt University. She taught English for several years in Mississippi and Tennessee and wrote two novels, Fire in the Morning (1948) and This Crooked Way (1952) before she won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953, which allowed her to move to Italy to focus on her writing. While in Italy, she met John Rusher, an Englishman who taught English to Italians. They were married 29 September 1956, the same year Spencer's novel The Voice at the Back Door was published.

Spencer spent 1976 to 1986 at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, as a writer-in-residence and professor in the graduate writing program. In 1985, she was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters (now the American Academy of Arts and Letters). From 1986 to 1992, Spencer was visiting professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Spencer was a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers (1987) and served as vice-chancellor, 1993-1997. In 1998, she published Landscapes of the Heart, a memoir of the Spencer and McCain families and growing up in Mississippi. On 17 December 1998 of that same year, Spencer's husband died. In 2001, a collection of many of Spencer's previously published stories was published along with some new fiction under the title The Southern Woman . In 2003, Spencer's 1960 novel, The Light in the Piazza, was adapted into a musical (music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, book by Craig Lucas).

Spencer has received many awards for her writing, including the Thomas Wolfe Award for Literature (2002) and the William Faulkner Medal for Literary Excellence (2002). She received an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1998.