Ellen Welcker’s first book, The Botanical Garden, was begun in the San Francisco Botanical Garden and completed (while gestating an alien) in Nevada and Vashon Island, Washington. Her poems and critical writing have appeared in Tinfish, Shampoo, Mudlark, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, Quarterly Conversation, and Gently Read Literature, among others. She is a graduate of Goddard College’s MFA program, and she lives in Seattle.