At 32, Eliot has carved out a name for herself with fiction that walks the line between lyrical and gritty, often centered on complicated women, forgotten towns, and the quiet rebellions that change everything.
Her debut novel, Saltwater Myth, became a cult favorite, praised for its haunting prose and unexpected tenderness.
Eliot grew up in a lakeside cabin in northern Minnesota, the daughter of a poet and a forest ranger. She wrote her first short story on the back of a canoe map during a thunderstorm and hasn’t stopped since. Before writing full-time, she worked as a bookseller, a bartender, and briefly as a private researcher for a local PI — a job that still influences her obsession with secrets and shadowed pasts.
She lives somewhere between the coast and the pines with a rescued greyhound named Wednesday, a collection of antique typewriters, and far too many notebooks. When she’s not writing, she’s people-watching in coffee shops, sketching out storylines in the margins of novels, or teaching intimate writing workshops for women with stories to tell.
It was a life that taught Eliot to listen closely — not just to people, but to the in-between moments. To the hush before a truth is spoken. To the way memory folds in on itself like fog over the ridge.
Her writing began as a way to make sense of that landscape — the physical one, yes, but also the emotional terrain of growing up with a mother who was both deeply nurturing and quietly broken by things she rarely talked about. There were weeks when her mother barely spoke, and others when she filled their kitchen with music, flour, and laughter so loud it scared off the deer.
Eliot left the mountains at eighteen, carrying nothing but a leather-bound journal and a promise to herself: to write the stories her mother never got to finish. Stories about women who stay soft in sharp places. About the ache of silence and the bravery of telling. About how light filters through even the most tangled forests.
Those stories — born from pine-needle floors and late-night firelight — are what Eliot still writes today.
