Eliza C. Walton earned her BA (1977) from Bennington College, writing a creative poetry thesis. In 1979, after a post-college stint in the editorial department of Rolling Stone magazine, she spent a year and nine months hospitalized with severe anorexia and bulimia, keeping a journal that would morph into the as-yet-unpublished memoir, Without Words. In 1983 she married Bill Walton, moving with him and their toddler Mac to a small farm on the coast of Maine. A writer by nature and habit, Eliza focused  for a time on raising three children among sheep, chickens, ponies and donkeys, while Bill’s work in the growing IT world kept him on the road and midair. Earning her MFA in fiction (2010) from the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast program, Eliza has published flash fiction in elimae, Bartleby Snopes, and A cappella Zoo. In 2019, Golden Alley Press published The Colors I Saw: A Cancer Memoir, which chronicles her experience with rectal cancer at age 53, exploring how a writer uses her craft to survive cancer treatment (with the help of a fictional alter ego.)

In November 2016, Bill was diagnosed with cancer, with a recurrence in August 2018. He needed two major surgeries, which altered his life, but he faced each challenge as a new problem to solve. Eliza kept notes and was working on a memoir of caretaking, loosely connected to The Colors I Saw. Another tumor took hold in August 2019. This time surgery was not an option, and chemo a very long shot. He started treatment mid-September of 2019. One month later, Bill died of chemo-induced pneumonia. Choosing not to end the caretaking memoir with his death, Eliza started Juggling Granite, a memoir of grief (also linked to Colors and currently under contract at Golden Alley Press.)

About her eating disorders Eliza says:

I am no longer, and haven’t been for forty years, embarrassed about having been anorexic and bulimic and finding my way back to health. I wouldn’t say I’m proud of it, but I think it’s what gives me the nerve to write openly about rectal cancer. Embarrassment doesn’t kill, it turns out.