“Ella has many gifts as a poet, and a real sensuous and lyric feeling for language. She is altogether a gratifying presence.”
Ella Mei Yon writes her family allegory, exploring how memory creates meaning beyond generation and culture.
Her work is published in Glimmer Train, Pigeon Pages, 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.
By day, Ella works in technology, leading a product design team working on augmented and virtual reality.