Liz Murray

Liz Murray (born in the Bronx, New York, in 1980) is best known as an American memoirist and speaker. She also trained in psychology, earning a degree in that field. Her life has become a widely cited example of social mobility through education, although some critics have pointed out that certain media portrayals of her story oversimplify it.

She grew up amid her parents' drug addiction, poverty and instability. After her mother died, when Murray was about fifteen, she became homeless and spent periods in friends' apartments, public spaces and subway stations. At seventeen she enrolled in an alternative high school for at-risk young people, finishing in two years a course that usually takes four, and graduated at the top of her class. A New York Times scholarship for students facing economic hardship helped her gain admission to Harvard in 2000. She later transferred to Columbia to care for her ailing father and earned a bachelor's degree in psychology in 2009. Her story inspired the television film Homeless to Harvard (2003), and her memoir Breaking Night, published in 2010, became a bestseller.