A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College (BA) and Arizona State University (MFA), Elissa has eight years of experience teaching creative writing, rhetoric, and narrative theory at Arizona State University and the University of Colorado Boulder. Before that, she worked in the financial and literary worlds in New York City. 

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Elissa's fiction was selected by Aimee Bender for National Public Radio (Public Radio International) Selected Shorts.

 

 

 

 

She has received support for her writing from the Virginia G. Piper Writing Center, The Vermont Studio Center, The Fine Arts Work Center (summer workshop), and The National Parks Service. She is the recipient of the Glendon and Kathryn Swarthout Award in Writing, and she serves as Associate Editor (Fiction) at Image Journal.

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Elissa grew up backpacking with llamas and harvesting red and green chile in New Mexico.  She makes her home in the mountains of Colorado.