BIO: Ellaraine Lockie is a widely published and awarded poet, nonfiction book author, and essayist. Her newest poetry book is the coauthored Trio from Poetrylandia. Her book DAIRY DELICIOUS: High-Calcium Cookbook and Kitchen Companion for the Lactose Intolerant releases from St. Johann Press in summer 2021.

Recent work has won the Poetry Super Highway Contest, the Nebraska Writers Guild’s Women of the Fur Trade Poetry Contest, New Millennium’s Monthly Musepaper Poetry Contest, and a First Place in the Artists Embassy International Dancing Poetry Contest. Her fourteenth chapbook, Sex and Other Slapsticks, has been released from Presa Press. Earlier collections won Poetry Forum’s Chapbook Contest Prize, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Competition, Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, Best Individual Poetry Collection Award from Purple Patch magazine in England Competition, and the Aurorean’s Chapbook Choice Award.

Her poems have found their ways onto broadsides, buses, rented cars, bicycles, cabins, greeting cards, key chains, bookmarks, mugs, coffee sack labels, church bulletins, radio shows, and cable TV as well as into hundreds of national and international journals, magazines and anthologies. Thirty of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and she has received multiple writing fellowship awards from both Summer Literary Seminars and Centrum Literary Residencies. Ellaraine teaches writing workshops, frequently judges poetry contests, and serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine LILIPOH.

Ellaraine reads the Weekly Poetry Podcast at Chrysanthemum Chronicles every Friday morning: anchor.fm/chrysanthemum-chronicles.

oprelle.com/pages/featured-writer-ellaraine-lockie.

“I know no one else who manages to combine quantity of poems with quality the way Ellaraine Lockie does. She is a font of creative ideas and brings the ultimate in craft and experience to the realizing of these products of inspiration, observation and research. I admire her work immensely.” —Gerald Locklin, Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Long Beach

“Ellaraine Lockie is one of the very few poets whose voice has touched me so profoundly that it inspired me to write a response poem. EL is a word surgeon, one who bothers with surface material only because it's in her direct path to the heart, where her work inevitably ends up. Lest there is any confusion, when I speak of the heart I mean the heart of the subject matter of the poem, the heart of how that subject matter might best be expressed, and the heart of the very fortunate reader who has found her work.” —Harvey Stanbrough, Novelist, Short Story Writer, Poet, Instructor

“Ellaraine Lockie is a true independent, unfazed by literary convention. She is one of the best, and Blue Ribbons at the County Fair is essential Lockie, worth twice the price.” —Eric Greinke, Presa Press

PUBLICATIONS:

Trio, Poetrylandia series, Wapshott Press, 2020
—Coauthored with Connie Post and Karla Huston
Sex & Other Slapsticks
, Presa Press, 2019
Tripping with the Top Down, FootHills Publishing, 2017
Folie à Quatre, Blank Ruin Press, Australia, 2017
—Coauthored with Alexis Rhone Fancher, Francesca Bell & Valli Poole
Love Me Tender in Midlife, IDES: A Collection of Poetry Chapbooks, Silver Birch Press, 2015
Where the Meadowlark Sings, Encircle Publications, 2014
—Winner of the Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest
Coffee House Confessions, Silver Birch Press, 2013
Wild as in Familiar, Finishing Line Press, 2011
—Finalist in Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition
Red for the Funeral, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly, 2010
—Winner of San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Contest
Stroking David’s Leg, FootHills Publishing, 2009
—Finalist in Pudding House Poetry Competition
Love in the Time of Electrons, Pudding House, 2009
—Finalist in Pudding House Poetry Competition
Blue Ribbons at the County Fair, PWJ Publishing, 2008
Mod Gods and Luggage Straps, BrickBat Revue, 2008
—a limited edition 13x19 broadside on paper made by Lockie
Finishing Lines, Snark Publishing, 2005
Coloring Outside the Lines, The Plowman Printing House, 2002 - OUT OF PRINT
Crossing the Center Line, Sweet Annie Press, 2002 - OUT OF PRINT
Midlife Muse, winner of Poetry Forum's Chapbook Contest, 2000 - OUT OF PRINT

Non-Fiction Books:

DAIRY DELICIOUS: High Calcium Cookbook/Kitchen Companion for the Lactose IntolerantSt. Johann Press, 2021
Creative Wedding Keepsakes (coauthored), Leisure Arts, 2002
All Because of a Button: Folklore, Fact and Fiction, St. Johann Press, 2001
The Gourmet Papermaker, Creative Publications (England), 2001
—Published in six additional countries under slightly different titles

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POEMS
The Last War

The woman I meet on the street
leaving her SUV wears a sable coat in August
Tomorrow sweat will slide
down her sundress like butter in the sun
The weather as out of balance
as the California budget
She may or may not know the trees
lining the cul-de-sac are dying before their time
Already the acacia has told hummingbirds
it's too tired to serve their fourteen meals every hour

If she had been in Montana last month
she'd have known that the sky cried long and hard
in record breaking depression and the ten-year
droughted ground couldn't absorb the tears
That ensuing floods washed
the Rocky Mountain Reservation down
the Bear Paw Mountains into a national disaster

The woman walks toward her Eichler
Ancestor cousin to the ancient houses in Pompeii
with no connection to the street
other than the door through which she disappears
Architecture that turns its back to the world and looks
into an atrium, entire walls of glass and private garden
The kind of isolation that money can buy in a city

So maybe the woman doesn't know Mother Nature
is revolting all over the world
We sink mine shafts into her body
in order to boast shiny baubles on our fingers
We drag out the rest of her entrails
if we haven't already dumped poison down them
Drain her lifeblood for bigger and better
Kill her offspring for sport and strip her naked
Who can blame her if she shakes with anger
Pours her wrath over us
Fights back with any weapon she possesses

Mother Earth will win this war
when she leaves cells of her spawn alive
After the descendants of the woman
whose sprinklers flood the sidewalk
are all swallowed, starved, smashed or buried
by the holocaust of consequences
Any mother would do the same

—Ellaraine Lockie