Elise Juska is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her previous novels include If We Had Known and The Blessings, a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers selection and one of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s best books of 2014. Her new novel, Reunion, is forthcoming from HarperCollins on May 7, 2024.

Elise’s short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, Prairie Schooner, Good Housekeeping, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, and other publications. She is the recipient of Ploughshares’ annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, and her stories have been cited as distinguished by the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. 

A graduate of Bowdoin College and the University of New Hampshire, Elise is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of the Arts, where she received the 2014 Lindback Award for Teaching Excellence. She has also taught fiction writing at The New School and served on the faculty at the Penn Writers Conference, Stonecoast Summer Writers Conference, Rosemont Summer Writers’ Retreat, and others.

Elise grew up outside Philadelphia, where she began typing stories at age five and now resides with her husband and son.