Blessings (Juska) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Universityof New Hammpshire
• Awards—Tom Williams Memorial Award; Charait Award
• Currently—lives in Maine and Philadelphia


Elise Juska's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review,  Missouri Review, Good Housekeeping, Hudson Review, Harvard Review, and many other publications. She is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction from Ploughshares, and her work has been cited in The Best American Short Stories.

She is the author of several novels—The Blessings (2014); One for Sorrow, Two for Joy (2007); The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (2004); and Getting Over Jack Wagner (2003).

Elise earned her Master’s in Fiction Writing at the University of New Hampshire, where she received the Tom Williams Memorial for fiction writing and the Charait Award for best short story. She has since taught fiction writing at The New School in NYC, in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire, and at numerous summer writing conferences.

Elise now spends summers writing on an island in Maine and the rest of the year teaching at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she directs the undergraduate Creative Writing Program and is the recipient of the 2014 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. (From the publisher.)