Lyndsey Ellis is a writer, community organizer, and founder of Show-Me Stories, LLC. She's loves exploring how regional history informs intergenerational experiences in the Midwest. Her debut novel, Bone Broth (Hidden Timber Books, 2021) was a 2022 Friends of American Writers Literature Award winner and selected as a first-year read at Maryville University for two consecutive school years. In 2023, she was a recipient of the inaugural Heartland Journalism Fellowship for The Common Reader: A Journal of the Essay at Washington University in St. Louis to cover outmigration of Black St. Louisans. She also received 2023 artist support grant from the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis to launch Plain Talk: Intergenerational Voices of St. Louis, a commmunity storytelling workshop series that honors the growth of local storytellers.
Ellis earned her BA in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia and MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She was a recipient of San Francisco Foundation's Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for her fiction.
A VONA and Squaw Valley Writers alumna, Ellis has had residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Paul Artspace and Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, and she was awarded a fiction fellowship from Kimbilio. Her writing appears in The New York Times, Kweli, Catapult, Joyland, Literary Hub, Shondaland, Narratively, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Smithsonian Magazine, and Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest, among others. Her short story, "American Haint", was a 2021 finalist for the Midwest Review's Great Midwest Writing Contest.
Ellis's passion for storytelling has fueled an extensive background in nonprofit communications. She finds joy working with grassroots organizations that support St. Louis's most vulnerable communities. Forever advocating the power of words, she teaches online creative writing classes at Gotham Writers Workshop, and she curates and edits prose for Scarlet, a literary journal run by Jaded Ibis Press. During her downtime, she enjoys pleasure reading, horror movies and nature walks with her dog, Titus. See CV here for more details.
Photo Credit: AG Photography