Liz Booker

Liz Booker is a retired Coast Guard helicopter pilot and writer hoping to inspire the next generation of women in aviation.

After dropping out of high school, Liz enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard at 18 years old and worked as a deck hand and ship navigator for five years before earning a commission through Officer Candidate School. A year later she attended Navy flight training and flew the H65 Dolphin (AS365) helicopter out of San Francisco, Miami, and Los Angeles on search and rescue, law enforcement, and humanitarian missions. She finally earned a bachelor’s degree online with American Military University after fifteen years on active duty and applied for the Coast Guard’s graduate school programs.

In 2008 she completed a Master’s in Public Administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and served as an Aviation Assignment Officer managing pilot accessions, career progression, and unit staffing for the Coast Guard’s 1200 pilots and 27 Air Stations. She spent the last six years of her 28-year career in Joint Military assignments as the Targeting Chief and Deputy for Operations at Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-SOUTH) where she coordinated multi-national counter-narcotics interdictions in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean Sea.

Her last assignment was as the Senior Defense Official to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean working for U.S. Southern Command as the senior military representative to the U.S. Ambassador and chiefs of police and defense for seven island nations. Before she retired, she used the rest of her G.I. Bill to earn a second master’s degree in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Liz’s Harvard experience gave her the confidence and skills to network and advocate for the Coast Guard’s women in aviation. It also opened her aperture to how she might positively impact the wider aviation culture and demographics through writing adventure fiction for young readers. She retired in 2019 to write full time, but was challenged to maintain momentum during Covid, feeling isolated from the aviation community.

As a way to reconnect, she launched the Aviatrix Book Club on Facebook. That small idea blossomed into a rich network of readers and writers centered around books featuring women in aviation. Liz hosts the Literary Aviatrix website, YouTube Channel, and podcast where she interviews authors about their books and their writing and publishing journeys. The authors are connected through the Aviatrix Writers’ group, where they encourage and mentor other women in aviation to share their stories through writing.

After five years of reading, discussing, and promoting books that feature women in aviation, Liz decided to write the book she wishes she had when she was starting out. Her current work in progress is a history of women in aviation against the backdrop of aviation history and the history of the women’s and civil rights movements. The work is intended to serve as the educational resource for an undergraduate level college course. If you only have time in your busy life to read one book, she wants this is to be the one you read as a jumping off point to the broader canon of stories featuring women in aviation.