Ellen Hinsey - Life and Work

Life and Work

Ellen Hinsey was born in 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts. For the last two decades she has lived in Europe. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Tufts University and a graduate degree from Université de Paris VII. She has taught at the French graduate school the Ecole Polytechnique and currently teaches at Skidmore College’s Paris program.

Hinsey's work is concerned with history and ethics. She has published volumes of poetry and translation, as well as long-form journalism. Her essays on democracy and memory in Central and Eastern Europe have appeared in "The New England Review", and will be collected in her book Mastering the Past: Reports from Central and Eastern Europe (forthcoming).

Hinsey’s first collection, Cities of Memory, won the Yale University Series Award and was published by Yale University Press (1996). The work draws on her experiences in Berlin on the weekend of November 9, 1989, as well as in Prague during the Velvet Revolution. Her second book, The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan University Press, 2002 / Bloodaxe Books, 2003), written after a family tragedy, is an exploration of ethics and spirituality.

Beginning in February 2002, she traveled to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague to listen to witness sessions. Her third book, Update on the Descent, addresses this experience and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. It was published in 2009 by Notre Dame University Press and Bloodaxe Books and has been called "an urgent, probing book." Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Die Welt, The Irish Times, The Paris Review and Poetry Review (UK) among other publications.

Hinsey is the editor and co-translator of The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova (Bloodaxe Books, 2008). She has also translated The Secret Piano, by Zhu Xiao-Mei, a memoir of a Chinese pianist growing up under the Cultural Revolution (Amazon Crossing, 2012) and Wild Harmonies, by Hélène Grimaud (Riverhead/Penguin Books, 2005).