Award winning author and poet Ellen Waterston has published four poetry and four literary nonfiction titles, including, most recently, We Could Die Doing This (2024) and Walking the High Desert (2020). 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. In 2024 she was appointed to a two-year term as the eleventh Oregon Poet Laureate and awarded both the Literary Arts of Portland’s Stewart H. Holbrook and Soapstone Bread and Roses awards recognizing her work as an author and advocate for the literary arts. Based in central Oregon, she serves on the faculty of OSU-Cascades’ MFA in Creative Writing. Ellen is completing a fifth collection of poetry.