Though born in Arizona, Elisabeth Sheffield grew up in the Leatherstocking Region of upstate New York. Since then, she has lived on both coasts of the United States as well as inbetween, and also in Northern Cyprus and Germany, where she was a Fulbright Lecturer in 1999/2000. Her short fiction has most recently appeared in Pretext, Gargoyle, The Denver Quarterly and 13th Moon, as well as the first volume of Chick-Lit. She has also written a critical book on James Joyce. Currently, she lives in Denver, Colorado with the writer Jeffrey DeShell and their two young sons, Leo and Francis, and teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

"For to the degree that “mother” is a word and a concept, it requires the annihilation of the individual existence of what it names. "Mother” collapses and destroys the differences between actual mothers, and instead derives its meaning in relation to other words and concepts, such as “father” and “child” and “other.” The term has no secret life beyond language, no pre-linguistic power...."

-Elisabeth Sheffield from “Genuine Ming or Fabulous Fake?: Deconstructions of Identity and Gender in Marianne Hauser’s The Talking Room”

"Sheffield deftly blances the southern gothic with her mordant wit."

-Booklist

"Among the gifts of confidence and newly opened doors, feminism of the 60’s and 70’s left us with one terrible burden: the unshakable belief that the patriarchal world was at fault for all our losses and unfulfilled needs.  With abundantly playful, rich and lyrical language, Elisabeth Sheffield takes the politically incorrect risk of exploring this burden and the havoc it can play in a woman’s life.  In her complex story of a search for inheritance and legacy, and an unresolved relationship that struggles on in only one person’s mind, Sheffield challenges the woman-as-victim literary model that has been flown from flagpoles for decades.  Sheffield shows us that women, in fact, are more interesting, more complicated and mysterious, more inspiring and significant, when they are victims mostly of their own human fragility."

-Cris Mazza