Ellen was born in Mississippi and has lived all over the American South. For two decades, she practiced law in Jackson, Mississippi. When she turned to writing, her first book introduced a new form of active prayer using broken and found objects to make crosses. Her short stories have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize; one story received a Special Mention. The stories in her award-winning audio collection have been downloaded over 50,000 times worldwide.

She was the Peter Taylor Fellow in Nonfiction at the Kenyon College Summer Writing Program. Her essay “Tetanus, You Understand?” was included in Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir by Sue Silverman (University of Georgia Press, 2009) as an example of metaphor.Her essays and short stories have appeared in Hotel Amerika, Brevity, Image, Alaska Quarterly Review, River Teeth, Texas Review, Gulf Coast, Barrelhouse, EAP the Magazine, Fourth Genre, Arkansas Review, and elsewhere. For eight years, she facilitated a weekly writing group of men and women experiencing homelessness culminating in the group’s memoir, which she edited. 

Ellen’s current project is the novel, In the Name of Mississippi, which was a Semi-finalist (25/600) in the James Jones First Novel Competition.

She divides her time between New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.