Elizabeth Crook

Elizabeth Crook is the author of six novels, including The Night Journal, which received a Spur award from Western Writers of America; Monday, Monday, which received the Jesse H. Jones Award from The Texas Institute of Letters and was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2014; and The Which Way Tree, designated by the Texas State Library and Archives as the 2024 adult Great Read “to represent the state’s literary landscape” at the National Book Festival. Her recent book, The Madstone, was lauded in The Washington Post as “the perfect adventure to curl up with on some desolate winter night.” Elizabeth has written for The Southwestern Historical Quarterly and Texas Monthly and is co-writer, with Stephen Harrigan, of the screenplay for The Which Way Tree, currently in development with Picturehouse and PantherDog LLC. She is a recipient of the Texas Book Festival’s prestigious Texas Writer Award. Her prose has been called “deftly rhythmic, often wry, and impeccably crafted” (Texas Monthly), “confident and lyrical” (Kirkus), her “words as carefully chosen as pearls on a matched necklace,” (USA Today) and holding “the sustained power of a drumbeat” (Houston Chronicle). Her various books have been described as “one of the most powerful anti-war statements,” (Houston Post, on Promised Lands);  and a “ripping adventure with a show-stopping finale” (Wall Street Journal, on The Which Way Tree.) The Madstone, “a wonderfully transporting tale of love in the Old West” (People) is described in the Houston Chron as “tender, violent, funny, and, like just about everything Crook writes, drenched in Texas history—not the mythological kind, but a deeply researched dive into largely forgotten details and dark corners.”

Elizabeth was born in Houston and spent her childhood in Nacogdoches and San Marcos, Texas, with two years away during grade school when her father served under Lyndon Johnson as national director of  VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and as Ambassador to Australia. In San Marcos she and her brother and sister attended public schools, and in 1982 Elizabeth graduated from Rice University. She currently lives in Austin with her husband, Marc Lewis, and has two grown children, Joseph Rainfield Lewis and Elizabeth Holdsworth Lewis.