Ellen Akins

Ellen Akins is an American novelist from South Bend, Indiana. She graduated from LaSalle High School in 1977, earning a BA in film production at the University of Southern California before working with Sydney Pollack. After losing interest in the film business, Akins enrolled in the creative writing program at Johns Hopkins University. In April 1993 she was awarded the Academy Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her fiction writing; she has also been given grants by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and won the Whiting Writer's Award in 1989.

Akins is the author of five books; the novels Home Movie, published in 1988 by Simon & Schuster, Little Woman, published in 1990 by Harper & Row, Public Life, published in 1993 by HarperCollins, and Hometown Brew, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1998, and the short story collection "World Like a Knife", published in 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. As well as writing, Akins has also taught at Western Michigan University, Northland College, and Fairleigh Dickinson University.