About
Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, winner of the Pencraft Award. Her novel Beware the Tall Grass is the winner of the Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence and will be published in March 2024 by CSU Press. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, and South Carolina Review, among other journals. She won the Bevel Summers Prize for short fiction. Morris is a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council.
Morris is also the author of Abide and Surrender, poetry chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in The Clackamas Literary Review, Juked, Gastronomica, and Inscape, among other journals and in eight anthologies. Morris won top prize in the 2008 Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition and was a finalist for the 2019 and 2020 Rita Dove Poetry Prize. Her poem “Abide” was featured on NPR’s A Way with Words. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, AARP’s The Ethel, Oh Reader magazine, and on National Public Radio.
Morris holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University-Charlotte.
Featured Work
Beware the Tall Grass
WINNER OF THE DONALD l. JORDAN PRIZE FOR LITERARY EXCELLENCE
Beware the Tall Grass weaves the stories of the Sloans, a modern family struggling with their young son Charlie’s troubling memories of a past life as a soldier in Vietnam, and Thomas Boone, a young man caught up in the drama of mid-60s America who is sent to Vietnam. Eve Sloan struggles as a mother to make sense of Charlie’s increasing references to war, and her attempts to get to the bottom of Charlie’s past life memories threaten her marriage, while Thomas struggles with loss and first love, before being thrust into combat and learning what matters most.
Other Works
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Lost Girls: Short Stories
2020
Awards and Recognition
- The Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence seeks to uplift works that uphold human values, such as trust, generosity, love, gratitude or responsibility.
