Elise Levine

Elise Levine writes and teaches formally adventurous fiction attentive to unstable memory, voice, and family relationships, drawing on her Canadian background. The 1995 Driving Men Mad became her first story collection and established the linguistic intensity that also marks her novels Requests and Dedications and Blue Field. Say This is a later collection of linked novellas from Biblioasis, returning to themes of loss, fractured testimony, and the difficulty of telling another person's story with certainty. Levine's work has appeared in Ploughshares, Blackbird, The Gettysburg Review, and Best Canadian Stories, and she has taught creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and Chatham University. She earned an MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and received a Canadian National Magazine Award for fiction. Across Driving Men Mad and Say This, Levine treats narrative form itself as subject matter, allowing repetition, interruption, and competing perspectives to reveal what conventional explanation leaves unresolved.