Ellen Stone was raised in the Appalachian Mountains above the north branch of the Susquehanna River in rural northeastern Pennsylvania. She taught special education for over thirty years in Kansas and Michigan public schools while raising three daughters with her husband. Ellen advises a poetry club at Community High School and co-hosts a monthly poetry series in Ann Arbor. She is the author of What Is in the Blood (Mayapple Press, 2020) and The Solid Living World (Michigan Writers' Cooperative Press, 2013).

Books by Ellen Stone:

Other poems on the web by Ellen Stone:
Five poems
Three poems
Two poems
"Elderberries"
"Flask"
Two poems
"The Gospel of Prudence"
"Container of Souls"
"North of coal country"
"Losing winter"
"Retribution"

Ellen Stone's Website.

About What Is in the Blood:

"With a mother's hospitalizations and diagnosis and a father immersed in maintaining the family homestead, how is a girl to find her place in the world? One answer may lie in her grounding in that world, the world of farmland and family, the mother's up and down energy, playing baseball, kneading dough, stirring tomato sauces, until Stone, as one of the eldest daughters, must take charge of the ghost mother s kitchen. Or in the sustenance that comes from the natural world the venison, elderberries and rhubarb, even the grasses and trees with which Ellen Stone's poems are lushly involved. Another is surely the clear-eyed acceptance with which the poems face the difficult hand the poet was dealt. The poems in What Is in the Blood do not complain. They journey, investigate, accumulate clues, become in and of themselves 'some kind of signal a trail I can follow.'"
—Terry Blackhawk

"Ellen Stone transfigures pain and trauma into poems of startling loveliness and immediacy. What she calls the true secret of switchgrass is her secret, too: 'It has already lived a thousand lives, yet / it rustles, hums, ripples '"
—Eric McHenry

"Stone is a master of detail and tight wording, and her themes of home, family, nature, and illness resonate in these selections. Both emotionally and linguistically, they re a treat to read even in the midst of their often-darker themes."
—Chila Woychik