About me
Poet and translator Ellen Doré Watson’s fifth collection of poems, pray me stay eager, is new from Alice James Books, which also published her first two books, We Live in Bodies and Ladder Music, winner of the New England/New York award. This Sharpening and Dogged Hearts were published by Tupelo Press in 2006 and 2010, respectively. Her poems have appeared in APR, Tin House, Orion, Field, Ploughshares, and The New Yorker. Among Watson’s honors are a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. She has translated a dozen books from the Brazilian Portuguese, including the work of Adélia Prado (The Alphabet in the Park and Ex-Voto), and co-translated contemporary Arabic language poetry with Saadi Simawe. Watson lives in Western Massachusetts, where she teaches and directs the Poetry Center at Smith College and serves as poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review. She is also core faculty at the Colrain Manuscript Conference and the Drew University Low-Residency MFA Program in Poetry and Translation.
