“Rilke called the poet the ‘priest of the invisible,’ and I will dub Eliese, as an essayist, a high priestess of the possible, which includes the impossible, as her work does things—and reveals things—that you wouldn’t have otherwise believed.”
-Jonh Estes, author of Kingdom Come and Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoon
Eliese, the writer
Eliese Colette Goldbach received an MFA in nonfiction from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Western Humanities Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Best American Essays 2017. She received the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Award and the Ohioana Library Association’s Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant, which is given to a young Ohio writer of promise. Her debut memoir, RUST, was a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award, and the story is currently being adapted into a play, which is set to premier at Dobama Theatre in April of 2025.
“An affecting, unblinking portrait of working-class life.”
-Kirkus Reviews
“Rust is at once a unique memoir and a broad indictment of America’s broken promise that anyone who came of age in the 21st century will find painfully familiar.”
-Sarah Kendzior, author of The View from Flyover Country
“Rust is a soulful telling of America’s stubborn and forgotten core. Deeply honest and defying easy sentimentality, this book heralds the arrival of a true talent.”
-Adam Chandler, author of Drive-Thru Dreams
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“Eliese Colette Goldbach uses formal experiment, broken narrative, and a voice that admits doubt and questions the terms of its own telling to fight silencing.”
-Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering
“Goldbach has learned to sing, in a prose of passion and power.”
-Pittsburgh Post Gazette
“Goldbach displays refreshing candor and hard-earned knowledge about the issues that divide us and the work that unites us.”
-Booklist
“Eliese Colette Goldbach may be the only essayist who does footnotes better than David Foster Wallace.”
-The Pitt News