Ellen Pauley Goff (she/her/hers) is a graduate from The University of Chicago with a B.A. in English Language and Literature, a minor in Film, and a concentration in Creative Writing. She has worked a lot of places to learn a lot of things: Kentucky Shakespeare, the oldest free Shakespeare festival in North America; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and The White House in the Office of Presidential Correspondence under the Obama Administration.
Ellen’s short fiction can be found in the Indiana Review, Hunger Mountain, Tulip Tree Review, New Millennium Writings, F(r)iction, and has also been chosen as a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open contest. Her novel-length work has also won the San Francisco Writers Conference Writing Contest. The Vermont College of Fine Arts’ literary journal Hunger Mountain selected her YA short story “The Cave Sighs” as the winner of their Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult & Children’s Writing. She is also the inaugural winner of SCBWI's A. Orr Fantasy Grant for children's/YA speculative fiction.
Her debut nonfiction piece “The Original Girl Dinner” published in The Inquisitive Eater (The New School) in March 2024.
Her latest short story “S.P.A.M.” is F(r)iction’s Grand Prize Winner of their Short Story Contest, selected by guest short fiction judge Madeline Miller (Circe). Her short story “Baptism” was the Grand Prize Winner of the New Millennium Writings Award for Fiction. Her poem “Southland Eulogy” was one of four select honorable mentions in the Atlanta Review’s International Poetry Prize contest.
Ellen was born and raised in the wilds of Kentucky and now lives in the wilds of New York City. She balances her creative projects with martial arts, and is a Second Degree Black Belt in Taekwondo. She currently works in NYC, where she also leads Underground YA, a Young Adult (and beyond) writing workshop and critique group with a mission of providing publishing knowledge and resources to un-agented, unpublished, and traditionally excluded writers.