Ellen Waterston

Before her first appointment as Oregon Poet Laureate in 2024, Ellen Waterston was recognized as one who had dedicated herself to writing and advocating for the literary arts in eastern and central Oregon, all the while continuing to write poetry and nonfiction works that have evolved into essential reading about Oregon and the West. During her first term, she further demonstrated she is not only a woman of letters but also a woman of action. Her poetry eloquently celebrates Oregon’s high desert, giving voice to the peoples and places of that vast region, simultaneously revealing how much the desert has to teach us all.

As Poet Laureate, her unflagging commitment to traveling the state of Oregon in the name of poetry has brought a wide variety of audiences and ages to an awareness of their “common humanity and common language,” as Waterston says. During her second term, to encourage a new generation of poets Waterston will feature young verse weavers in her statewide appearances with the goal of gathering their poems in an anthology titled Meet Me on the Divide. A companion project, which she calls P!PP (Poetry in Public Places), will facilitate the public display of poems, from permanent art installations to poetry walks, in small and large Oregon communities to celebrate poetry and underscore what an accessible and durable art form poetry is.

Released in January of 2026, her chapbook As Far as I Can Anthem (2026) is her fifth poetry title. She has published four literary nonfiction titles, including, most recently, We Could Die Doing This (2024) and Walking the High Desert (2020).

Her award-winning poems and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals and her verse novel, Vía Láctea, adapted to a libretto, premiered in 2016 as a full-length opera. She writes a monthly column on aging for The SOURCE,  a Bend newsweekly, and is the author of Sharing Common Ground, an Oregon Desert Land Trust interview project conducted in southeastern Oregon.

In 2024, Waterston was named to her first two-year term as the eleventh Poet Laureate of Oregon and, also that year, received both the Soapstone Bread and Roses Award and the Stewart H Holbrook Award. Waterston is the founder of the Writing Ranch which, since 2000, has conducted workshops for established and emerging writers. She was the founder and, for over a decade, director of The Nature of Words, a literary arts nonprofit serving central Oregon. She is also the founder of the annual Waterston Desert Writing Prize, established in 2015 and adopted in 2019 as a program of the High Desert Museum.

Her poems and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies including Anthology of American Poets, Bear Deluxe, Best Essays Northwest, Deer Drink the Moon, Echoes, Edge of Awe, High Desert Journal, Home Waters, Kosmos, Oregon Quarterly, RANGE, West Wind Review and Windfall. In addition to being the recipient of fellowships and competitive residencies, her awards include Diderot Fellowship, Obsidian Prize in Poetry, Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, two-time WILLA winner in poetry, WILLA finalist in literary nonfiction, Foreword and Ellen Meloy finalist in literary nonfiction, and an honorary Ph.D. in Humane Letters from Oregon State University-Cascades. She is currently working on a manuscript of poetry and historical nonfiction. She lives in central Oregon.