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Ellen Waterston is an award-wining poet and essayist from Bend, Oregon. A New Englander who married and moved to the ranching West, Ellen grounds her writing in both of those cultural and geographic landscapes. Her award-winning essays, short stories and poems have been published in numerous journals, anthologies and reviews. Her most recent book, Where the Crooked River Rises: A High Desert Home (OSU Press 2010), illuminates the people, places and landscape of Central Oregon’s vast high desert, and was partly written during her Sitka residency. Two collections of Ellen’s poetry, Between Desert Seasons and I Am Madagascar, have been awarded WILLA Prizes in Poetry (2009 and 2005, respectively). Her memoir, Then There Was No Mountain, was selected by the Oregonian as one of the top ten books in 2003.Ellen is the founder and director of The Nature of Words, an annual literary event that brings nationally recognized authors and poets for four days of readings, panel discussions, and workshops to Bend, Oregon the first weekend of November.