Ellen Doré Watson

Ellen Doré Watson is an American poet, translator and teacher.

Watson is author of five collections of poems, most recently, Dogged Hearts (Tupelo Press). Her book, Ladder Music, was a New York/New England Award winner from Alice James Books. Other honors include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant and a Rona Jaffe Writers Award.

Watson has translated eleven books, including The Alphabet in the Park: The Selected poems of Adélia Prado (Wesleyan University Press), for which she was awarded an NEA Translation Fellowship and interviewed by BOMB Magazine. In addition to her Brazilian Portuguese translations, the Winter 1999 issue of Modern Poetry in Translation features contemporary Palestinian poetry she co-translated from the Arabic with Saadi Simawe.

Her poems have appeared in literary journals, including Orion Magazine,Ploughshares, Boulevard, The Cortland Review, AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker, and in anthologies including After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events (Santa Lucia Books, 2008), Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English, (Wesleyan University Press, 2000), and Never Before: Poems About First Experiences (Four Way Books, 2005).

Watson grew up in Plainview, New York, and received her B.A. and MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and lives in Conway, Massachusetts. She is the director of The Poetry Center at Smith College, and Lecturer in the English Department, where she teaches Reading Contemporary Poetry. She is a poetry editor for The Massachusetts Review, and a member of the Alice James Books Cooperative Board.

Full-Length Poetry Collections

• Dogged Hearts (Tupelo Press, 2010)
• This Sharpening (Tupelo Press, 2006)
• Ladder Music (Alice James Books, 2002)
• We Live in Bodies (Alice James Books, 1997)

Chapbooks

• Broken Railings (Owl Creek Press, Winner of the Green Lake Chapbook Poetry Prize)

Selected Translations

• Zero: by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003)
• The Alphabet in the Park: The Selected poems of Adélia Prado (Wesleyan University Press, 1990)