About Ellyn Bache

Ellyn Bache's fiction has appeared in dozens of commercial and literary magazines, ranging from Shenandoah and Ascent to Seventeen and Good Housekeeping; been collected in a book (The Value of Kindness) that won the Willa Cather Fiction Prize; and been a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award in short fiction. She has also written nine novels. One of them, Safe Passage, was made into a film starring Susan Sarandon, and another, The Art of Saying Goodbye (William Morrow, 2011), was an “Okra Pick” from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA), and a SIBA Book Award nominee. Of the stories included here, two have been published — “Husband,” under the title, “The Soup of Human Kindness," in the Carolina Quarterly, and “Cousin Calvin,” in slightly different form, in New Letters, under the title “Calvin the Criminal.” More information is on her website, www.ellynbache.com.

She is co-author of the book of a musical comedy, Writers' Bloc, about a group of aspiring writers who critique each other and share stories about their dreams and (alas) their rejections. Ellyn says “I love musical theater but have absolutely no musical talent, so was lucky to work with a talented composer, Joyce Cooper, who co-authored the book with me and wrote all the music and all the lyrics.”