Life and work

Ellen Hinsey was born in 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts. For the last two decades she has lived in Europe. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Tufts University and a graduate degree from Université de Paris VII. She has taught at the French graduate school the Ecole Polytechnique and currently teaches at Skidmore College’s Paris program.

Hinsey’s first poetry collection, Cities of Memory, won the Yale University Series Award in Poetry and was published by Yale University Press (1996). The work draws on her experiences in Berlin on November 9, 1989, as well as in Prague during the Velvet Revolution. Her second book, The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan University Press, 2002 / Bloodaxe Books, 2003), written after a family tragedy, is an exploration of poetry, ethics and spirituality.

Beginning in February 2002, she traveled to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991, more commonly referred to as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia or ICTY, is a...

 in The Hague to listen to witness sessions. Her third book, Update on the Descent, addresses this experience and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. It was published in 2009 by Notre Dame University Press and Bloodaxe Books and has been called "an urgent, probing book." Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Die Welt, The Irish Times, The Paris Review, Poetry and Poetry Review (UK) among other publications.

Hinsey has also written long-form journalism on history and politics. Her essays on democracy and memory in Central and Eastern Europe have appeared in The New England Review.

Hinsey is the editor and co-translator of The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova

Tomas Venclova

Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian scholar, poet, author and translator of literature.Tomas Venclova is son of poet and Soviet politician Antanas Venclova. He was educated at Vilnius University. As an active participant in the dissident movement he was deprived of Soviet citizenship in 1977 and had...

(Bloodaxe Books, 2008). She has also translated The Secret Piano, by Zhu Xiao-Mei, a memoir of a Chinese pianist growing up under the Cultural Revolution (Amazon Crossing, 2012) and Wild Harmonies, by Hélène Grimaud (Riverhead/Penguin Books, 2005).

Honors and awards

• 2007 The Stover Memorial Award / The Southwest Review
  
• 2001 Berlin Prize Fellowship / The American Academy in Berlin
  
• 2001 The Union League Civic and Arts Poetry Prize / Poetry
  
• 1998 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award
  

Books

• Update on the Descent (Notre Dame University Press & Bloodaxe Books, 2009)
  
• The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan University Press, 2002 / Bloodaxe Books, 2003)
  
• Cities of Memory (Yale University Press, 1996)
  

Translations

• The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova (Bloodaxe Books, 2009)
  
• The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations, by Zhu Xiao-Mei (AmazonCrossing, 2012)
  
• Wild Harmonies, by Hélène Grimaud (Riverhead Press, 2006)
  

External links

• Susan Wheatley, "An Interview with Ellen Hinsey", in Poetry International, October 3, 2009
• University of Notre Dame Press
• "Update on the Last Judgment" at Poetry Foundation.org
• Review of The White Fire of Time at Critique magazine
• Author's website