Ellyn Bache (edit name/settings)

From the author's website

A native of Washington, DC, Ellyn Bache studied English at the Universities of North Carolina and Maryland, but didn’t begin to write seriously until two of her four children were born and she knew, for sanity’s sake, she’d better find an “adult” activity to do at home during the children’s naps. She started as a freelance newspaper journalist while teaching herself to write fiction. After nearly six years of rejection slips, her short stories began to be published in both commercial magazines like Good Housekeeping and Seventeen, and literary magazines ranging from Shenandoah to the Carolina Quarterly. A collection of sixteen of her stories, The Value of Kindness, won the Willa Cather Fiction Prize.

Ellyn’s first novel, Safe Passage, about a family waiting to hear the fate of a son near the site of a terrorist bombing, was later made into a film starring Susan Sarandon and Sam Shepard. Ellyn continues to write novels and short fiction for both adults and young people, more than a dozen books to date. Her most recent novel, The Art of Saying Goodbye, was a Summer 2011 SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) “Okra Pick” — a program that gives special attention to titles booksellers especially like, out of the hundreds published each season. Currently, The Art of Saying Goodbye is a SIBA Book of the Year Award nominee.

After more than twenty years in Wilmington, NC, Ellyn now lives in Greenville, SC, near two of her sons and six of her twelve grandchildren.