InkCredible Profile

Michael Ellis, was professionally published before he graduated from high school. His dialect poems, “Black  shoes” and “What Ya Stealin for?” were enough to impress the University of Puget Sound, where he majored in English and minored  in Journalism. Six years later Ellis went from the page to the stage, performing in more than a hundred readings. He became an orator,  and a dramatist, teaching himself to perform in more than twenty different voices. He used his ability more often to help people who were victims of abuse and injustice. On stage  he tells stories by combining prose and poetry, naming his style "Prosetry”. 

Compared often  to renaissance poet Langston Hughes, Ellis worked for years to expand his  skill set. He wanted to be more than a dialect poet. The pressure of historical comparison began to take a devastating toll. In 1996 Pulitzer prize winning poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, wrote him the first of four times.  She told him to calm down and that it would all make sense in time.

 In 2006, he was invited on scholarship to Howard University for the first chapter  of a novel, Dear Oprah. He performed at the Hurston- Wright annual convention. Months later he was also honored with a prize at Sacramento State University for  that same novel. He was also awarded a second prize for his children’s short story, “The Legend of Sleepy.” Michael Ellis followed with They Wouldn’t Let Me Be White 2015. In 2019 he published Dear Oprah, a rhyming full length Novel

He taught creative writing for two years to inmates at a maximum security Prison and currently works in the public school system mentoring the young. He is the founder of the group KEYNOTE POETS which has a chapter in the US and in Africa..