Ellen Waterston performs her poetry as guest of In A Landscape and classical pianist Hunter Noack on Mount Bachelor in Bend, Oregon July 18, 2022

View Ellen Waterston in this video recorded at Summer Fishtrap 2022

Ellen Waterston was named Oregon Poet Laureate in August 2024 for a two-year term. Also in 2024, Ellen received the Stewart H. Holbrook Award and the Soapstone Bread and Roses Award.

Ellen’s next book, titled We Could Die Doing This, a collection of essays, will be released late 2024.

Released May 2020, Ellen Waterston’s third and latest nonfiction title, Walking the High Desert, Encounters with Rural America along the Oregon Desert Trail, University of Washington Press, is receiving strong praise:

“There is no better guide to Oregon's high desert than Ellen Waterston. Her sense of place, her lyrical love of this sometimes hard to love place, her balanced yet passionate dissection of the issues roiling the big land of junipers and open sky is a wonderful match for her subject. While the West is full of poets who love the land, few of them are as intellectually nimble as Waterston.”

-Timothy Egan, author of A Pilgrimage to Eternity and columnist for The New York Times

Ellen is also the author of a collection of essays, Where the Crooked River Rises, Oregon State University Press; a memoir, Then There Was No Mountain, Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group; and four poetry titles: Hotel Domilocos, Moonglade Press, Between Desert Seasons, Wordcraft of Oregon and I Am Madagascar, Ice River Press. Her fourth poetry title and verse novel, Vía Láctea, A Woman of a Certain Age Walks the Camino, published by Atelier 6000, she subsequently converted to a libretto. It premiered as a full-length opera and is slated for a second staging.

Her award-winning essays and poems have been featured in many journals and anthologies. Poetry awards include the WILLA Award in Poetry for two of her collections and the Obsidian Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, grants and residencies. She was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by Oregon State University Cascades for her accomplishments as an author and poet and her promotion of the literary arts.

As a literary arts advocate, she is the founder of the Writing Ranch which offers workshops and retreats for established and emerging writers. She was the founder and, for over a decade, the executive director of The Nature of Words, a literary arts nonprofit featuring an annual literary festival in Bend, Oregon and creative writing workshops in regional schools, social welfare programs, and at its literary arts center’s Storefront Project. She subsequently founded the Waterston Desert Writing Prize which, in 2020, was adopted by the High Desert Museum. This Prize annually recognizes a nonfiction book proposal that examines the role of deserts in the human narrative. Waterston is on the faculty of OSU Cascades MFA Low Residency program.

Writers Reading: The Source Weekly Annual Poetry Contest
Watch this YouTube video of poets, including Ellen Waterston, reading their winning submissions. Co-produced by the Source Weekly, the Deschutes Public Library and the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Oregon State University-Cascades.

READ Ellen’s monthly column in the Source Weekly, “The Third Act,” a column on ageism and aging.

Watch Ellen’s January 21, 2021 interview, “Sense of Place,” with Source Weekly’s Aaron Switzer and Laurel Braun “Bend Don’t Break” Series.

LISTEN to Ellen’s December 9, 2020 interview with Dave Miller on OPB’s “Think Out Loud.”
Oregon Public Broadcasting

READ a review of Walking the High Desert by John Harrington Jr. in the December 2020 issue of the Journal of Geography.

READ a review of Walking the High Desert by C. L. Johnson, from CHOICEconnect October 2020, a publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association.

LISTEN TO ELLEN’S INTERVIEW October 2020 with Alan Chartock of NPR station WAMC in Albany, NY about Walking the High Desert (20:00)

ENJOY “THE NATURE OF ISOLATION.” From the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Authors and artists included in the anthology will be featured each day in October, including a poem by Ellen Waterston (3:01)

READ EXCERPTS FROM ELLEN’S NEW BOOK, Walking the High Desert, Encounters with Rural America Along the Oregon Desert Trail. From The Source Weekly’s Cascade Reader May 31, 2020.

READ AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 7 OF ELLEN’S NEW BOOK, Walking the High Desert, on the Oregon Natural Desert Association Website.

LISTEN Two conversations with Ellen Waterston and Global Business Coach Susanne Mueller on her “Take It From the Iron Woman” podcast. The first interview is about Walking the High Desert and Ellen’s evolution as a writer. The second interview is about Ellen as an athlete.

LISTEN TO ELLEN READ TWO RECENT POEMS ON KOSMOS JOURNAL

LISTEN TO GARRISON KEILLOR READ ELLEN’S POEM

TUNE IN TO ELLEN’S TEDX TALK

Metaphormosis - Change Your Metaphor, Change Your Life 3:32