Ellen Austin-Li was born and raised in Syracuse, New York. She received her BS in Nursing at Boston College in 1980, then lived and worked in Boston as a pediatric critical care nurse for eighteen years. She moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, with her husband, where they started a family. After raising her two sons, Ellen decided to take a class at Women Writing for a Change. There she discovered her passion for words.

Ellen’s a current member of The Greater Cincinnati Writers League https://cincinnatiwritersleague.org/ and The Cincinnati Writers Project http://cincinnatiwriters.com/. She’s active in many local and regional workshops. She also co-founded the monthly poetry reading series, Poetry Night at Sitwell’s (see Events & Home pages for more details).

Ellen’s work has appeared in Artemis, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Maine Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Rust + Moth, The Stone Canoe, Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, The Lily Poetry Review, and other places. Her two chapbooks were published by Finishing Line Press—Firefly (2019) and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic (2021). She is a Best of the Net nominee. A recipient of the Martin B. Bernstein Fellowship, she earned an MFA in Poetry at the Solstice Low-Residency Program. Ellen lives with her husband in a newly empty nest in Cincinnati, Ohio.