Ellen Doré Watson’s fifth and most recent volume of poems is Dogged Hearts (Tupelo Press, 2010). Earlier books include This Sharpening, also from Tupelo, and two from Alice James, We Live in Bodies and Ladder Music, winner of the New England/New York award. Her journal appearances include APR, Tin House, Orion, Field, Ploughshares, and The New Yorker. Among her honors are a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant, a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Zoland Poetry Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. She has translated a dozen books from the Brazilian Portuguese, including The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado (Wesleyan University Press), and also co-translates contemporary Arabic language poetry with Saadi Simawe.

Watson lives in Western Massachusetts, where she directs the Poetry Center at Smith College and serves as poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review. Other teaching includes the Colrain Manuscript Conference (core faculty), the Drew University Low-Residency MFA program in poetry and translation, and a generative writing workshop in Northampton.