New York Times Editor’s Choice

NPR Book of the Day

National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

Mary Sawyers Imboden Prize

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Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson is the author of the critically-acclaimed book Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free (Simon & Schuster, 2025). Named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an Amazon Editor’s pick for Best History, and a must-read book featured in Oprah Daily, The Atlantic, Elle, Forbes, Harper's Bazaar, and on NPR's All Things Considered, among many others, Dickinson’s first book has been hailed as an exceptional biography and an essential read that “puts the American fashion icon Claire McCardell back in the pantheon,” according to The New York Times Book Review.

Elizabeth’s writing career encompasses cultural criticism, narrative nonfiction, investigative journalism, short fiction, and memoir and her work has been widely published in places like The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Washington Post Magazine, The Southern Review, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among many others.

Her nonfiction earned recognition in The Best American Essays anthology and she is a two-time recipient of the Independent Artist Award from The Maryland State Arts Council. In 2017, Elizabeth was awarded the Mary Sawyers Baker Prize in the Literary Arts, and in 2018 she was a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. In 2023, Elizabeth became the first literary artist in Maryland to win the prestigious Mary Sawyers Imboden Prize from the Baker Artist Awards. It is given in recognition of artists who demonstrate excellence in mastery of craft, depth of artistic exploration, and unique vision.

Elizabeth’s writing has been supported with fellowships and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Ragdale; and through grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and The Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, to name a few.

In an interview with NPR, Dickinson was asked about how McCardell thrived at a time when Christian Dior, and his signature silhouette, was the leading designer of the post-war era: “In my research on Claire, I found this amazing article called "The Gal Who Defied Dior," and it raised this question of, like, what? What was the defiance? What was the beef? Well, the work that Claire did to free women with these clothes that allowed them to move about the world - in 1947, the war ends, Christian Dior comes on the scene, and he creates something that was called the New Look. It included that classic '50s look that I think we all think of - the broad shoulders, the really tight, cinched waist, and the wide, full skirts. His desire was to, quote, "save women from nature," meaning he wanted to structure their body to the clothes.

McCardell always wanted to structure the clothes to a woman's life, and she was not happy about Dior trying to cinch women back into 18-inch waists. I mean, Dior's models were literally fainting at some of the fittings from how tight and restrictive the clothes were, and she really did not care for this regression of women being objects versus women being autonomous and independent purveyors of their own lives.”

Elizabeth has taught graduate level writing at Johns Hopkins University, and she currently teaches in the Graphic Design MFA program at MICA. She lives in Baltimore city with her family and a very opinionated corgi named Buddy.