Elizabeth Hadaway used to be called Leigh Palmer and yearned to get out of the mountains of Virginia. She marched in Christmas parades wearing spangled short-shorts but didn’t keep in step. She was an instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University, a historical interpreter at Agecroft Hall in Richmond, Virginia, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Randall Jarrell Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Hadaway has received scholarships to the Breadloaf and Sewanee writer’s conferences and lives in Kingsville, Maryland.

About Fire Baton:

"Fire Baton is an immense achievement. Here is wit acid and sweet, angry and gentle, tonic and forgiving. Every line shines with the excellence of poetic craft but none is ostentatious The play of intellect is so light and nimble that it lends grace to every line and every word. Hadaway’s satire is deceptive in its strength. If you think you feel a pinprick, better look again. It may be a bullet hole. Lyrical, oh yes—but sharply pointed: 'even the music / is no escape.'"
—Fred Chappell

"Elizabeth Hadaway’s Fire Baton is formally elegant, yet effortlessly sassy and vernacular at the same time. In poem after poem, she proves herself place-proud without a trace of the provincial, and she’s exactly what a poet should be—smart and passionate."
—Gregory Orr

"Hadaway is a young poet with convictions. She shoots double-barreled poems at the despoilers of the earth and the confiners of the spirit. I admire the content and craft of Fire Baton."
—Elizabeth Seydel Morgan