Ellery Akers

photo: Stephanie Mohan

NEWS:

About Ellery Akers

Ellery Akers is an award-winning writer and artist living on the coast of Northern California.

Her book of poems, Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance, is available from Blue Light Press. Her previous collection, Practicing the Truth, won the 2014 Autumn House Poetry Prize, the 2015 Bay Area Book Festival Award, and a 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award. Her first poetry book, Knocking on the Earth, was named a Best Book of the Year by The San Jose Mercury News. She is also the author of a children's novel, Sarah's Waterfall: A Healing Story About Sexual Abuse.

Akers has won thirteen national writing awards, including the John Masefield and Paumanok Awards, the Poetry International Prize, and Sierra magazine's Nature Writing Award. Her poetry has been featured on American Life in Poetry and on National Public Radio and has appeared in such journals as Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and the New York Times Magazine. Her nature essays have been published in numerous anthologies, including Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals (Ballantine). Her play, Letters to Anna, won a Dominican University One Act Play Festival Award.

Among her honors are fellowships from Blue Mountain Center, the MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Ucross Foundation.

She has taught at private workshops and at Cabrillo College, and has been on the faculty of writing conferences at Squaw Valley, Humboldt State University, Foothill College, and Skyline College.

An award-winning visual artist as well, Akers has exhibited her artwork in galleries and museums nationally, including the Anchorage Museum of History and Art and the Muscarelle Museum of Art.

Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance

Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance by Ellery Akers

cover art: “Mill Valley Lumber”
© 2015 by Tom Killion

“In the world we are in now, and the harrowing world to come, we need poems as guides, and as resistance to the forces that would corrupt and diminish us. For some time now, Ellery Akers has been crafting these necessary poems. Swerve is a book that confronts the primary issues of the 21st century with insight and candor, along with hope and courage.”
Joseph Stroud, author of Everything That Rises and Of This World: New and Selected Poems

“True and brave… I have just discovered a remarkable book.”
Kathleen Dean Moore, environmental activist and author of Piano Tide and Wild Comfort

“…An intelligent and deeply political set of poems.”
Kirkus Reviews