ELIZABETH FLOCK is an Emmy Award–winning journalist and author with a focus on stories about women and the fight for justice. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and The Atlantic, and on PBS NewsHour and Netflix, among other outlets. Her new book, THE FURIES: Women, Vengeance, and Justice, tells the stories of three unforgettable women who used violence to protect themselves when institutions — government, police, and courts — utterly failed to do so.
She is the host of Blind Plea, a podcast about a woman who claimed Stand Your Ground, from Lemonada Media. Her reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center, PEN America, and the International Women’s Media Foundation. Her first book, THE HEART IS A SHIFTING SEA: Love and Marriage in Mumbai, won a Nautilus Book Award for books that inspire and make a difference.
She holds a masters degree in longform journalism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU, and has taught as an adjunct professor at American University in Washington D.C. She is represented by Suzanne Gluck (literary), Elizabeth Wachtel and Addie Poris (documentary) and Chelsea Kreps (podcast) at William Morris Endeavor, and lives in Chicago, Illinois.
elizabethflock@gmail.com
Twitter: @lizflock
Instagram: @lizflock
The Furies
RENOWNED JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR OF ‘THE HEART IS A SHIFTING SEA’ ELIZABETH FLOCK INVESTIGATES what few dare to confront, or even imagine: the role and necessity of female-led violence in response to systems built against women.
In THE FURIES, Elizabeth Flock examines how three real-life women have used violence to fight back, and how views of women who defend their lives are often distorted by their depictions in media and pop culture. These three immersive narratives follow Brittany Smith, a young woman from Stevenson, Alabama, who killed a man she said raped her but was denied the protection of the Stand-Your-Ground law; Angoori Dahariya, leader of a gang in Uttar Pradesh, India, dedicated to avenging victims of domestic abuse; and Cicek Mustafa Zibo, a fighter in a thousands-strong all-female militia that battled ISIS in Syria. Each woman chose to use lethal force to gain power, safety, and freedom when the institutions meant to protect them—government, police, courts—utterly failed to do so. Each woman has been criticized for their actions by those who believe that violence is never the answer.
Through Flock’s propulsive prose and remarkable research on the ground—embedded with families, communities, and organizations in America, India, and Syria—THE FURIES examines, with exquisite nuance, whether the fight for women’s safety is fully possible without force. Do these women’s acts of vengeance help or hurt them, and ultimately, all women? Did they create lasting change in entrenched misogynistic and paternalistic systems? And ultimately, what would societies in which women have real power look like?
Across mythologies and throughout history, the stories of women’s lives frequently end with their bodies as sites of violence. But there are also celebrated tales of women, real and fictional, who have fought back. The novelistic accounts of these three women provoke questions about how to achieve true gender equality, and offer profound insights in the quest for answers.
PRESS
The Heart is a Shifting Sea
IN THE VEIN OF ‘BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS’, an intimate, deeply reported and revelatory examination of love, marriage, and the state of modern India—as witnessed through the lives of three very different couples in today’s Mumbai.
In twenty-first-century India, tradition is colliding with Western culture, a clash that touches the lives of everyday Indians from the wealthiest to the poorest. While ethnicity, class, and religion are influencing the nation’s development, so too are pop culture and technology—an uneasy fusion whose impact is most evident in the institution of marriage.
THE HEART IS A SHIFTING SEA introduces three couples whose relationships illuminate these sweeping cultural shifts in dramatic ways: Veer and Maya, a forward-thinking professional couple whose union is tested by Maya’s desire for independence; Shahzad and Sabeena, whose desperation for a child becomes entwined with the changing face of Islam; and Ashok and Parvati, whose arranged marriage, made possible by an online matchmaker, blossoms into true love. Though these three middle-class couples are at different stages in their lives and come from diverse religious backgrounds, their stories build on one another to present a layered, nuanced, and fascinating mosaic of the universal challenges, possibilities, and promise of matrimony in its present state.
Elizabeth Flock has observed the evolving state of India from inside Mumbai, its largest metropolis. She spent close to a decade getting to know these couples—listening to their stories and living in their homes, where she was privy to countless moments of marital joy, inevitable frustration, dramatic upheaval, and whispered confessions and secrets. The result is a phenomenal feat of reportage that is both an enthralling portrait of a nation in the midst of transition and an unforgettable look at the universal mysteries of love and marriage that connect us all.
“A fascinatingly intimate study of India’s progressive new generation, illuminating the distance between our romantic imaginings and reality.”
— Vogue
“In the mode of Katherine Boo and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Flock absents herself from the narrative, allowing us to enter the lives of her subjects and witness moments of almost unbearable intimacy.”
— The New York Times
PRESS
Gaza’s Maternal Health Crisis
Marie Claire Magazine
Whistleblowing a Crisis Pregnancy Center
Elle Magazine
On Vigilantes and Vengeance
Lit Hub
Terrorists Or Heroes?
The Economist
Why Kurdish Women Fight
The Guardian
A Violent Defense
The New Yorker
Forgotten Airstrikes
Foreign Policy
The Green Gang
Californian Sunday Magazine
The Heart Still Stands
Atavist
Pandemic Blues
The Atlantic
The Body, Brain & Love
New York Times
License Debt Trap
PBS NewsHour
Cruel and Unusual
Searchlight New Mexico
I Can’t Escape My Abuser
Cosmopolitan
A Review of “Know My Name”
Washington Post
On Women & Desire
The Washington Post
On the Fire Line
PBS Newshour
Alabama vs. Brittany Smith
The New Yorker
A Women’s Movement in Trumpland
PBS Newshour
Op-Ed: Don’t Jail Abused Women
The Washington Post
A Week of Russian Propaganda
PBS Newshour
Impossible Choices
PBS Newshour
On the Fire Line
In the Emmy Award-winning PBS NewsHour investigation ‘On the Fire Line,’ dozens of female firefighters share their stores of rape, harassment and retaliation in the U.S. Forest Service.
State of Alabama vs. Brittany Smith
Based on the New Yorker piece 'A Violence Defense,' the Netflix documentary ‘State of Alabama vs Brittany Smith’ tells the story of a woman trying to use Alabama's Stand Your Ground law after killing a man who brutally attacked her.
Hosted by Emmy Award-winning journalist Elizabeth Flock, Blind Plea asks: Who do we believe, and why? And in America, who has the right to self-defense and a fair trial?
In 2017, Deven Grey, a young mother, shot and killed her abusive partner in a remote trailer in rural Shelby County, Alabama. She claimed self-defense and filed a Stand Your Ground claim.
Instead of freedom, she was handed a “blind plea” – an option to take an unknown sentence in exchange for pleading guilty. As a Black woman who shot and killed a white man in Alabama, she did the only thing she could: She took the plea. Deven’s sentence became the final link in a chain of deceit, haunted land, generational trauma, false identity, coercive control, and a broken justice system.
Winner of a Signal Award.
