Ellen Parent grew up in rural Vermont and spent her childhood torn between her love of the mountains and valleys of her home and a strong urge to go adventuring. This tension pushed her to leave Vermont, made it inevitable that she would return, and inspired the first kernels of her forthcoming novel, After the Fall. Ellen writes because she’s driven to explore the concept of home: its landscapes, its people, its contradictions. She also writes because it’s a delight to submerge in new worlds and to play around with words.
Ellen penned her first book in sixth grade, an opus chronicling a young girl’s secret spy mission across multiple continents. Critics raved, with one friend declaring it “cool” and an English teacher reflecting, “I kept wondering when it was going to end.” Undeterred, Ellen turned to poetry and spent her high school years haunting the local bookstore and, in the tradition of all great adolescent poets, scribbling self-consciously in a little black notebook.
After high school, Ellen finally left Vermont to earn a B.A. in Poetry from Wheaton College. A French minor, Ellen studied abroad in Paris and then returned to France after graduation to teach English in the rural farming community of Montmorillon. After a year of gallivanting around Europe, the call of Vermont’s leaf-loam breezes and goldenrod roadsides pulled her back. Because she loved writing and books, she earned her teaching license in English from Champlain College. Upon realizing that writing and books make up a surprisingly small portion of a healthy high school English class, she added a low-residency Master of Fine Arts to her life, earning her M.F.A in Fiction from the Solstice program at Lasell University. At Solstice, she benefited from the mentorship of poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, novelist Laura Williams McCaffrey, and many other inspiring faculty and students.
Today, Ellen teaches at Harwood Union High School and balances writing with gardening, painting, and making movies with her friends. She was a finalist for the Vermont Writers Prize in 2015, and a finalist for the Mike Resnick Memorial Award for Fiction in 2022. Her poetry has been featured in Vermont Magazine, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, and the anthology Birchsong: Poetry Centered in Vermont, among others. Her debut novel, After the Fall, is young adult climate fiction set in a future version of Vermont devastated by the effects of climate change. In After the Fall, a young woman searches for the truth about her past in a world where history has long been forgotten. Ellen lives in a small house on the edge of a big field with her writer husband, her young daughter, and two entitled cats.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you After the Fall in the fall of 2024.
