In Remembrance of Elizabeth Penfield, 1939-2026

Elizabeth VanderHorst Few Penfield, 87, died peacefully at home in Savannah, GA of complications from myeloma on February 6, 2026. 

Elizabeth was born in New York City in 1939 to Benjamin Furguson and Caroline Weston Few. The family, including Elizabeth’s brother Benjamin, lived at Sutton Place in Manhattan and in Southport, CT.  Elizabeth, a graduate of the Chapin School, class of 1956, received a BA degree from Sweet Briar College and a master's degree in English from Duke University.  She married Thornton Penfield, whom she met at Duke, in 1962. 

Her 1962 New York Times wedding announcement describes Liz as an “equestrienne,” and horses truly remained a love of hers for her entire life. As a young woman she competed in horse shows at Madison Square Garden and the Fairfield County, CT hunt clubs.  To this day her mailbox is full of requests for continued support from organizations working to rescue old horses and protect wild ones—as well as appeals from almost every other wildlife advocacy organization in the world, most of which she supported.

In 1966, Liz joined the faculty at the University of New Orleans, where she became a professor in the Department of Language and Literature and ultimately Chair of the UNO English Department. She was awarded the University of New Orleans Alumni Excellence in Teaching award in 1993 and over the course of her career received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Liberal Arts Research Council, the Graduate Research Council, and the Louisiana Council for the Humanities.  Liz is known for specializing in composition and rhetorical modes as an editor and author. As a professor, she is known for her innovative style of teaching writing and for the many books she published to guide students.  Her most notable book, the still popular Short Takes: Model Essays for Compositions, was published in 11 editions over 34 years.

Liz remained fiercely committed to UNO’s open enrollment policy and its embrace of older students and those from underserved areas.  In a 2010 Op Ed for the New Orleans Times Picayune when UNO was fighting funding cuts, she reminded the world that “when UNO, then LSU-NO, opened in 1958, it was the only integrated university in the state.

Then after Hurricane Katrina, many years later, UNO was the first university in the city to hold a graduation.”  A visit to Professor Penfield’s class was a chance to glimpse both the breadth of New Orleans’ diversity and the gift Liz had for making good writing a skill truly achievable for everyone.   

Another passion of Liz’s were the mountains of Colorado and the homesteader’s log cabin she bought in the late 1960s. She spent summers and sabbaticals there her whole life and contributed over the years to the community in and around the town of Carbondale. In the summers you might find her hiking up Mount Sopris, and in the winter cross country skiing the area of Missouri Heights around the cabin.  Much of her writing happened there.

In the late 1980s, Liz and her life-long friend Theodora Hill, traveled to East Africa on safari and fell in love with the land and the animals.  They went on to start Traditional Tented Safaris, a business they ran for two decades sending clients on luxurious safari vacations.  Along the way, they crossed the oceans from New Orleans to Kenya aboard a banana freighter, lived for extended stretches in Kenya, and studied Swahili at the School of Kiswahili and Foreign Languages at the State University of Zanzibar in Tanzania. They also introduced the thrill of the East African landscape and its wildlife to their friends and family, including Teddy’s seven grandchildren. 

Elizabeth is survived by her partner Theodora Hill; and Theodora’s daughters Karen Balliet, her husband Michael, and their children Hill (Becca Wainess) and Margot (Muhammad Khan); and Louise Washer, her wife Mary Clay Fields, and their children Sophie, Julia, and Elliot Broach (Fangfang) and Nicholas Flynn (Emily) and Kathleen Flynn.

Donations may be made in Elizabeth’s name to EarthJustice or the African Wildlife Foundation.