Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne ’01 was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2020. She is a writer whose nonfiction has been published in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The New Republic and Amherst magazine, among other venues. Her short fiction has appeared in Broad River Review and Barren Magazine. Her debut novel, Holding On to Nothing (Blair, 2019), won a Gold Medal at the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best Regional Fiction from the South.
For reporting on infectious diseases in Uganda and South Africa, respectively, Shelburne has held a Gates Family Foundation Fellowship at the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins University and a Kaiser Family Foundation Global Health Reporting Fellowship. She was an interviewer for the Louisiana State Museum/New Haven Oral History Project after Hurricane Katrina. She has worked as a writing teacher and as an editor, including five years on the editorial staff of The Atlantic.
Shelburne was a longtime board member and co-chair at the Cambridge Ellis School and is a current board member at WBUR, Boston’s public radio station. In 2016–17, she served on the board of Peer Health Exchange Boston. She and her husband have been active supporters of the Broad Institute’s tuberculosis research program.
Originally from East Tennessee, Shelburne graduated from Amherst College magna cum laude with a B.A. in English. She is also a 2013 graduate of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program. She lives in Cambridge, Mass., with her husband, Mike DeMichele ’00, and four children.