About the Author

Author's Note Elisavietta Ritchie's prose, poetry, photographs, translations are widely published, translated, and anthologized in the United States and abroad. Credits include The New York Times, The Washington Post, Poetry, American Scholar, The Christian Science Monitor, JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, Canadian Woman Studies, Confrontation, Potomac Review, and numerous other publications. Tightening the Circle Over Eel Country won the Great Lakes Colleges Association's "New Writer's Award, 1975-1976." Individual poems and stories won awards from the Poetry Society of America, National Endowment for the Arts, The Ledge, Bright Hill Press, and others. Several were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Ritchie writes, translates, edits, gives readings, workshops, serves as poetin- the- schools, and helps writers of various ages. She was long active with the Washington Writers' Publishing House, where, after winning annual awards for a book of poetry and later of fiction, she served first as president of the poetry then the fiction division. She also created The Wineberry Press to publish others' manuscripts too unconventional for regular presses. She traveled to several continents independently and as a Visiting Overseas Speaker for the United States Information Service. Her most recent collection from Poets' Choice Publishers is Reflections: Poems on Paintings, A Poet's Gallery; readings of these poems can be accompanied with the paintings (most of which are at The National Gallery) which inspired them on PowerPoint. Ritchie has been nurturing poets, painters, musicians and wildlife, and writing on the shores of the Patuxent River, Maryland, the Potomac, Washington DC, and rivers and seacoasts of Cyprus, Malaysia, the Balkans, Australia, Canada and briefly, the USSR and the African continent.