Elise Juska is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the new novel Reunion, published in May by HarperCollins and named a New York Times Editors’ Choice. 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.

Elise’s work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, LitHub, Ploughshares, and many 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 was the founding director of the undergraduate creative program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she received the 2014 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. She is currently a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.

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