Ellen Wittlinger

Ellen Wittlinger
Ellen Wittlinger
	File:Ellenwittlinger2.jpg Ellen Wittlinger, 2004
Born	21 October 1948; Belleville, Illinois, U.S.A
Occupation	Novelist, young adult fiction writer
Genre	Young Adult
Website
	http://www.ellenwittlinger.com/

Ellen Wittlinger is an author for young adults, including Gracie's Girl and the Printz Honor book Hard Love. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and lives in western Massachusetts.

Biography Ellen Wittlinger was born in Belleville, Illinois on October 21, 1948 and lived there until she left for college at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois. She was the only child of parents who owned a small grocery store.

After college, she moved to Ashland, Oregon. Around this time she was accepted into the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa for my Master of Fine Arts degree. Orignally, she wanted to become a poet, and she published a book of poetry, Breakers, in 1979.

After that she spent three years living in Provincetown, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, where some of her books have been set. She had two fellowship years in Provincetown at the Fine Arts Work Center, a residential program which nurtures young artists. There she wrote fiction adn poetry, and soon after began to try her hand at playwriting. She also worked for the local newspaper, The Provincetown Advocate.

She was interested in writing plays due to fact that she loved all the dialogue involved. All of her plays were given staged readings in Boston and one of them was done in a limited performance in New York City. It also won the author's prize at the annual Eastern Massachusetts Association of Community Theaters competition. Over the years Ellen Wittliner has been a finalist four times in the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship programs, twice in poetry, and once each in fiction and playwriting.

After having two children of her own, Ellen decided to try to write for young adults. She states that "Some of the first and most inspiring books I read were Celine and The Goats, by Brock Cole, and The Great Gilly Hopkins and Jacob Have I Loved, by Katherine Paterson.". Her first novel, Lombardo's Law, was published in 1993.