ELISE JUSKA grew up outside Philadelphia and attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where she majored in English and won the Hawthorne and Sinkinson Prizes for her short stories. She completed her Master's in Writing at the University of New Hampshire in 1997, receiving the Lt. Albert Charait Award for best short story and the Tom Williams Memorial Award for excellence in fiction writing.

She has published three novels with Simon & Schuster: Getting Over Jack Wagner, The Hazards of Sleeping Alone, and One for Sorrow, Two for Joy.

Her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines including The Hudson Review, Harvard Review, American Literary Review, Salmagundi, Black Warrior Review, The Seattle Review, Calyx, Berkeley Fiction Review, Good Housekeeping, Philadelphia Stories, The Carolina Quarterly and the anthologies Philly Fiction and Writes of Passage: Coming-of-Age Stories and Memoirs from The Hudson Review. The novella "Perfect Weather for Driving" was included in the anthology Cold Feet and nonfiction has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer and the anthology The Subway Chronicles: Scenes from Life in New York.

Elise has taught fiction writing at The New School in New York City, in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire, and at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she received the Director's Award for Teaching Excellence. She has served on the fiction faculty at several writing conferences including the Rosemont Summer Writers' Retreat, the Penn Writers Conference at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Stonecoast Summer Writers Conference in Casco Bay, Maine.

She currently teaches fiction writing at the University of the Arts and is working on a new novel. Read about it at Esquire.com.