Scott Elliott grew up in Louisville, Kentucky and on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. Scott’s first novel Coiled in the Heart (Bluehen/Putnam, 2003) was a Booksense 76 Selection, a Literary Guild alternate selection, and a finalist in two award categories for The Texas Institute of Letters. The novel was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition with Bob Edwards and was chosen for the 2005 American Library of Congress sponsored One-Community-One-Campus-One-Book celebration in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Scott’s essays and short stories have been published in several literary and other journals including the Antioch Review, The New York Times, the Louisville Review, Juked, Mayday, Forklift Ohio, Hawk and Handsaw, the Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. His collection of short stories Return Arrangements was a 2009 finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction. In 2011 he was awarded the G. Thomas Edwards Award for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship at Whitman College, where he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and English. In 2012 he founded the Walla Walla Whitman Imaginative Writing Partnership, which places talented Whitman undergraduate writers in public schools. He lives in Walla Walla, Washington with his family.