“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
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 was adapted for stage by Dobama Theatre in April of 2025.
“Goldbach has learned to sing, in a prose of passion and power.”
-Pittsburgh Post Gazette
“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
“Eliese Colette Goldbach may be the only essayist who does footnotes better than David Foster Wallace.”
-The Pitt News