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.