Ellen Girardeau Kempler is an award-winning nonfiction writer, photographer, and poet whose work has been extensively published in print and online. In 2024, one of her poems was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” her chapbook, Thirty Views of a Changing World, was published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press.
A 2021 recipient of a Fostering Creativity in a Time of Crisis Grant from the city of Laguna Beach, California, Kempler established a poetry trail through downtown. It features short poems by community members in response to public art. She helps coordinate the Laguna Beach Library’s annual poetry contest and judges poetry submissions for Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Programs’ annual international student scholarship contest.
With a master’s degree in mass communication, she has over 25 years of professional public relations and marketing experience with museums, aquariums, botanic gardens, science institutions, and conservation organizations. An active supporter of arts, social justice, and environmental causes, she is a climate-conscious traveler who embraces culturally immersive adventures. In her writing practice, she follows the late poet Mary Oliver’s “Instructions for Living a Life”: Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.
Paperback: 70 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (March 6, 2025)