Ellen Skirvin teaches and serves as the Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Penn State University. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in The Sun, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, Baltimore Review, CutBank, The Forge, and other places.

Ellen co-edited This Book is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes From the Appalachian Prison Book Project (WVU Press, 2024), which won the Weatherford Award in Nonfiction. The book presents a collection of letters and artwork by people in prison that highlights the work done by the Appalachian Prison Book Project (APBP), a nonprofit that provides books and educational resources to incarcerated people in Appalachia. Ellen has volunteered with APBP since 2019 and served as its Treasurer for four years.

She is currently working on a novel and a collection of interconnected short stories.

When she’s not working, she enjoys failing at gardening, misidentifying wildflowers, and gabbing with her dog, Loogy, on hikes in central Pennsylvania.