Elizabeth King is a writer, researcher, speaker and principal educator at Elizabeth King Coaching, Inc, based in Nashville. She is the author of Outsmarting the SAT (Ten Speed Press 2008) and Acing the ACT (Ten Speed Press 2015), coauthor of Lou Imbriano’s Winning the Customer (McGraw-Hill 2011), an ongoing contributor to several media sites and ghostwriter of other memoirs and articles.

Elizabeth graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 2001 with a special Bachelor of Arts degree in Cultural Economics—an ostensible hybrid of economics and art history with minors in math and studio art. She was awarded a Mount Holyoke College 1905 Fellowship and a Mount Holyoke College Elisabeth Miller Bardwell Fellowship after graduation and has served on her class board since 2011.

Elizabeth’s writing, speaking and consulting roles revolve around cultivating personal development, critical thinking, quality culture, creativity, intelligence and learning. She explores these themes on her popular blog Stay Out of School, which she founded in 2010, in her research projects about cultural messages that influence student and public educational perspectives and in her direct work with students from around the world.

Elizabeth served as an adviser on educational affairs and committee member in the Office of the Mayor of West Palm Beach in 2013, offering support during the charter school selection process. She also wrote the city’s Mayor’s Challenge submission that year. She frequently mentors small business owners, has served as a mentor at multiple Startup Weekends up and down the eastern seaboard since 2013 and has served as a founding board member for the New York non-profit opera organization North Shore Music Festival since 2010.

She has twice appeared on the Sirius XM Show The Process with UPenn’s dean of admissions Eric Furda, was highlighted by Fast Company Magazine in 2012 as a thriving member of Generation Flux and appeared on Oprah Sirius Radio’s Derrick Ashong Experience to talk about creative ways to make private test prep obsolete. The US Olympic team highlighted her interviews with Olympic gold medalist Barbara Ann Cochran about applying mental toughness to test-taking and her thoughts on testing and education have been referenced in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal on Campus and across the web.

So far, Elizabeth has lived outside Philadelphia, all over South Florida, and in New York City, Portland, Oregon and Providence, Rhode Island. She currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee. A card-carrying bleeding heart, Elizabeth rescues and adopts things: used books, sad plants, antique Christmas ornaments and dogs (nine, to date).