Elizabeth White Olsen is the author of Bringing Butterflies Home: Gardening to Heal Our Yards and Ourselves and co-founder of Houston's GO Native Landscaping, LLC, along with her husband, Glenn Olsen. Through GO Native’s on-site consultations, custom landscape designs, presentations, and classes, she and her husband have supported hundreds of homeowners, business owners, and municipal and nonprofit employees choose sustainable, bird-and-butterfly-friendly landscapes. She has achieved Native Plant Society of Texas Landscape Certification Levels 1 and 3. In 2021, White Olsen was trained and certified as a Texas Master Naturalist. She teaches adult writing and nature education classes at Rice's Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies and holds two master’s degrees of fine arts in writing.

After being displaced by the Hurricane Harvey floods, in 2019 White Olsen worked as a flood protection advocate for Houston's Bayou City Initiative. In 2014, she founded Writespace literary arts center in Houston. She achieved her two M.F.A. degrees at Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2013 and at Texas State University in San Marcos in 2005. In 1999, she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in Plan II Honors and English, after transferring from Oberlin College in Ohio.