Elise Skidmore is a native New Yorker, who has been writing poetry since she was a child. In 1994, when her husband and several of her friends were trying to get her interested in email and switching from a typewriter to a computer, she stumbled upon Compuserve's Literary forum (Today it's called the Books and Writers Community). There she met a bunch of wonderful people, including her favorite author, Diana Gabaldon, who helped broaden her horizons and delve into fiction writing as well as poetry. She eventually joined the staff, spending nearly 10 years as the section leader of the Writing Exercises and in Compuserve's Poetry Forum. In 2004, when Compuserve opened to the web, she and a friend started a private writers' forum called SectionSixx, which nurtured writers for more than 10 years.

Elise lives on Long Island with her husband of 40+ years and feels blessed to have had the best parents, husband, and children a woman could ask for. The strong bonds of family are often the subject of her writing, but there aren't many topics she's afraid to tackle, including stories of vampires, devil possession, WWII POW camps, and gunslingers in the old west.

Her hobbies include reading, photography, travel, and making people smile.