Ella has many gifts as a poet, and a real sensuous and lyric feeling for language. She is altogether a gratifying presence.
— Vijay Seshadri, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, 2014

Ella Mei Yon writes her family allegory, exploring how memory creates meaning beyond generation and culture.

Her work is published in Glimmer Train, River Teeth, Pigeon Pages, Five Minute Lit, Under Water New York, and elsewhere. Her writing has earned her three-time acceptance to the Tin House Writer's Workshop. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College and an MSc in fiction and poetry from The University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Ella tells the stories of her Chinese-Nicaraguan family, her English heritage, and her own experience growing up as a mixed-race, first-generation American. To fuel her work, she also conducts extensive research, records family interviews, and catalogs family photographs, ephemera, and notebooks.

Publications

 

“Tiring the Ghosts” in River Teeth

“No Words” in Five Minute Lit

Mother Words” in Pigeon Pages

Tuesday” in Glimmer Train, issue 84

Finding a Way In” in Glimmer Train’s Bulletin

Descending” in Underwater New York 

A Subway Hope” in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood

Book Review: Wild by Cheryl Strayed

 

The Good Hurt by Ella Mei Yon

The Book 

The Good Hurt is a family memoir that sets out to excavate beauty and healing from our most challenging experiences. The reader joins Ella in an exploration of childhood belonging, family secrets, and the ghosts that haunt her. She retraces her ancestors’ steps, going back to post-revolution Nicaragua, 27 years since her family fled and a booming city in China that use to be her grandfather’s small village. These family journeys are juxtaposed by her average American upbringing in which she never quite belonged and the family curse that continues to haunt her into adulthood. Ultimately these stories collide to demonstrate the healing power of language and storytelling.

With humanity, grace, and incredible scope, Ella Mei Yon’s The Good Hurt walks fearlessly into the most painful areas of human existence in search of meaning. Using her life as an entry point, she is an incisive observer of each moment, drawing connections across time and distance, the present moment and all of history, in trauma and in quietude, querying what keeps us apart even as we are right beside each other. A deeply empathic writer, she is just as much a warrior of the human heart, a survivor. A necessary voice.
— Sarah Gerard, author of Sunshine State
In The Good Hurt, Ella Mei Yon’s profound empathy and close observations elevate the mundane and ground the sublime. She has a voice like no other, as lyrical
and rhythmic as it is clear and cutting.
— Nicole Haroutunian, author of Speed Dreaming
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