Elisabeth Wilkins Lombardo

Elisabeth Wilkins Lombardo was awarded the 2009 PEN/New England Fiction Discovery Prize for the unpublished manuscript of her novel, Obon. She went to Japan as an exchange student in college and stayed for ten more years, traveling extensively throughout Asia from her home in Kobe, Japan, where she worked as a radio and TV personality, teacher, and writer. Her prize-winning essay about the Great Hanshin Earthquake, “After the Quake,” was translated into Japanese and subsequently published in an anthology of the same name. Her stories have been published in The Japan Times, The Daily Yomiuri, Mothering, Motherhood (Singapore), and Kansai Timeout. Elisabeth received her MFA from the Stonecoast Creative Writing Program in 2005. At the time of her death in 2015, Wilkins Lombardo was the editor of Empowering Parents, an award-winning online parenting magazine with a growing international readership of more than 500,000. She lived in Cape Elizabeth, Maine with her husband and son.