Elizabeth Scott Tervo’s gripping memoir, The Sun Does Not Shine Without You: a Memoir of Soviet Georgia, about her time as a exchange student in the country of Georgia on the eve of its freedom from the USSR, was published in 2025 by Basilian Media.

Eve in the Time Machine, also from Basilian Media, is her first book of poetry.

Her poetry and stories have appeared in Ruminate, Eye to the Telescope, the Wheel, the Basilian, Agape Review, New Haven Review, and elsewhere, and won a prize at Inscape. She co-coordinates the Doxacon Seattle writers group for Speculative Literature & Christianity.

მზე არ მზეობს უშენოდ (The Sun Does Not Shine Without You), was published in 2021 by Azri books (Tbilisi, Georgia) and sold out its initial run.

A native of Boston, she now lives in the Pacific Northwest. She is married to Father Michael Tervo and she enjoys life as a Presbytera in the Greek Orthodox Church.

She is the author of the essay “Orthodoxy and Ecumenism” (varying understandings of ecumenism in Russian and American Orthodox Christianity) in The Reception of the Holy and Great Council: Reflections of Orthodox Christian Women, ed. Carrie Frost, from the Greek Archdiocese of America Dept. Of Ecumenical and Inter-Faith Affairs, 2018.

Literary citizen and volunteer work: Elizabeth is poetry editor for the Rule of Faith journal (formerly the Basilian Journal of Orthodox Faith and Culture). She has volunteered with NAMI Whatcom (local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness) since 2022, and has been the Newsletter compiler for Whatcom Writers and Publishers (county writers’ group) also since 2022.