Ellen Waterston at Western Oregon University
Write Place welcomes Oregon Poet Laureate Ellen Waterston to read and discuss her work on Thursday, April 30, at 4:00 pm in the Werner Center’s Willamette Room.
WOU president, Dr. Jesse Peters, will introduce Professor Waterston.
Ellen Waterston is the author of several books, including Walking the High Desert: Encounters with Rural America along the Oregon Desert Trail, We Could Die Doing This: Dispatches on Ageing from Oregon’s Outback, the essay collection Where the Crooked River Rises, the memoir Then There Was No Mountain, and five poetry collections, most recently, As Far As I Can Anthem.
In 2024 she was appointed the eleventh Oregon Poet Laureate.
Based in Bend, Waterston founded and manages the Writing Ranch, which since 2000 has conducted generative writing workshops, and the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, now a program of The High Desert Museum. Professor Waterston teaches in the OSU-Cascades MFA Program in Creative Writing.
About Ellen Waterston
High desert author, poet and columnist Ellen Waterston has published five poetry and four literary nonfiction titles, including, most recently, As Far as I Can Anthem, Poems (2026), We Could Die Doing This (2024), and Walking the High Desert (2020). In 2024, she was appointed to a two-year term as the eleventh Oregon Poet Laureate and awarded both the Stewart H. Holbrook and Soapstone Bread and Roses awards recognizing her work as an author and advocate for the literary arts. Waterston’s awards and recognitions include the WILLA in both nonfiction and poetry, Foreword finalist in literary nonfiction, the Obsidian Prize in Poetry, an honorary Ph.D. in Humane Letters from Oregon State University Cascades and individual artist fellowships from Diderot, Fishtrap and the Oregon Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is founder of the Writing Ranch which, since 2000, has conducted workshops for established and emerging writers, and of the annual Waterston Desert Writing Prize, established in 2015 and adopted in 2019 as a program of the High Desert Museum.
