A native of Washington, DC, Ellyn Bache studied English at the Universities of North Carolina and Maryland, but didn’t begin writing seriously until the first 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 began 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 back home waiting to hear the fate of a son at the site of a terrorist bombing, was later made into a film starring Susan Sarandon and Sam Shepard. Since then, she has continued to write novels for both adults and young people.  With her late husband, Terry, she authored a teen novel, Takedown, under the pen name E.M.J. Benjamin — a story about a high school wrestler with epilepsy that was a Foreword Magazine Best Book of the Year finalist.  More recently she has written several books for elementary school children that are widely used in public school classrooms. Ellyn has also written a nonfiction journal about sponsoring Vietnamese refugees, and a children’s picture book, Daddy and the Pink Flash, which was illustrated by artist Carole Tornatore.

After more than twenty years in Wilmington, NC, Ellyn now divides her time between the Carolinas and Pennsylvania.