Elyse Gasco was born in Montreal. She received a B.A. in Creative Writing from Concordia University and an M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University. Her award-winning collection of short stories, Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby? was published in 1999 and was the recipient of the QSPELL/FEWQ First Book Award and a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award.