Meet the Author - Ellie Black

Join us on Saturday, September 5th at 6:00 p.m. for a reading and book signing with poet Ellie Black, author of Revelator.
About this Event

Revelator by Ellie Black
"Ellie Black writes with the urgency of someone who knows the body and the internet are both battleground and altar. These poems crackle electric with nerve and intellect—a live wire between the sacred and the pixelated. Black's poems are unafraid to confront power, spectacle, and girlhood rendered mythic and monstrous. A most dazzling debut!"--Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Night Owl

Chosen by Dorothea Lasky as the winner of the 2026 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Ellie Black's debut collection, Revelator, glitches and falters, iterates and alludes. This is a book concerned deeply with what's real, what's fake, and what's fantasy. With equal parts humor and horror, this fragmented, oracular collection explores the consequences of the increasingly blurry digital-physical landscape in which we find ourselves and its relationship to power, control, and what we worship. These poems transform shards of language, pop culture, and literature into a tightly wound poetics of excess engaged with an incantatory attention to sound. Famous women, teenage girls, movie characters, and reluctant prophets are victims, villains, and victors, sometimes all at once. Here, boundaries blur between high and low. Angels visit and animatronics come to life. Sylvia Plath, Lee Edelman, and Evil Dead II share space in a single poem. Revelation, this collection proposes, exists at the limits of confessional poetry, religious confession, the dramatic twist, and the divine promise of an apocalyptic ending. Revelator offers up a mirror to how we invent and perform ourselves on stages, on screens, and in our lives.

Ellie Black is a Visiting Assistant Professor in English–Creative Writing at Hendrix College. She received both a PhD in Creative Writing (emphasis in memoir/autotheory) and an MFA in poetry from the University of Mississippi. A 2026 Gregory Djanikian Scholar and finalist for the 2025 Disquiet Prize in Poetry, her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Bennington Review, Sixth Finch, The Common, Washington Square Review, The Drift, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Revelator, received the 2026 APR/Honickman First Book Prize.