Ellen Waterston is a poet, educator, and speaker living in Bend. She is the author of several books, including Walking the High Desert, Encounters with Rural America along the Oregon Desert Trail, the essay collection Where the Crooked River Rises, the memoir Then There Was No Mountain, and four poetry titles: Hotel Domilocos, Between Desert Seasons, I Am Madagascar, and Vía Láctea, A Woman of a Certain Age Walks the Camino.
Waterston’s poems have appeared in anthologies and journals, been featured on Writer’s Almanac and landed her numerous fellowships, grants and residencies. Her poetry awards include the WILLA Award for two of her collections and the Obsidian Prize for Poetry. Waterston is currently completing a fifth collection featuring a series of commissioned poems celebrating remote locations across the West.
In addition to her work as an author, Waterston founded the for-profit Writing Ranch, offering retreats and workshops for established and emerging writers, and the Bend-based literary arts nonprofit, The Nature of Words, which she directed for over a decade. She subsequently founded the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, annually recognizing a nonfiction book proposal that examines the role of deserts in the human narrative, now a program of The High Desert Museum. She has instructed creative writing at high school and undergraduate levels and authored the original feasibility study for OSU Cascades Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing, where she now teaches.
Her work as an author and literary arts advocate was earlier recognized with an honorary Ph.D. in Humane Letters from OSU-Cascades and, in 2024, with both the Literary Arts of Oregon’s Stewart H. Holbrook Award and Soapstone’s Bread and Roses Award. “We celebrate Ellen Waterston for her work creating a vibrant literary life east of the Cascades,” said Soapstone. “She created unique and important events, focused attention on the literature of the High Desert and mentored numerous writers while writing poetry and nonfiction works that have become an essential part of the literature of Oregon and the West.”
Waterston says, “Inspired by the example of the Poets Laureate who have preceded me, I am eager to share my love of poetry, place and the power of the written word with Oregon’s diverse audiences and to kindling creativity and community as I go.”
