Ellen Peckham, visual artist, poet and memoirist, was born in Rochester, NY in 1938. She frequently uses both art forms in a single work, the text decorating and explicating, the image illuminating.
The latest example of her work is best seen in the video Reiterations: Viewing Art from a Dark Time, 7 minutes from a recent presentation at The Church in Sag Harbor, NY. And in her book, Arrested Ephemera: Haiga, featuring 66 full-color, full-page illustrations and 45 haiku published by Paper Crown Press (2015); in the 12-page spread in Carrier Pigeon (2012); and in the 85-page catalog for her solo exhibition, Continuum: The Art of Ellen Peckham (2012), which includes texts and a CD of settings of her poems by Gerald Busby. Her drafts, edits, publications, original sketches and prints are collected in the archives of the Doubly Gifted Collection at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, East Brunswick, NJ, and other museums. She has read across the US, at Shakespeare & Company in Paris, the Poetry Café, and The Old Operating Theatre in London. Her work was recently featured in the 2019 Solar Impressions Exhibition in Southampton, NY later toured. In 2021 a solo exhibition with readings and video seemed to celebrate Covid’s retreat.
In 2023 an 8-minute video, Invitation to a Private Space, sharing over 60 years of output and her creative environment was released and two books, Decades Burning and Continuum, made available as Flipbooks.
In 2009, she was invited by the Instituto Peruano Norteamericano in Lima, Peru, to hold a solo exhibition and conduct readings in Spanish and English of her poems published for the occasion in the illustrated bi-lingual Recording Loss/Registro de una Pérdida. Readings with video from Lima were organized in Arequipa and Trujillo by The American Embassy.
Both poetry and images have been widely published in the United States in, to name a few, The Christian Science Monitor, The Literary Review, Penumbra, The Atlanta Review, The Spoon River Review, The Comstock Review, in anthologies including The Widow’s Handbook with an introduction by Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2014), in three volumes of Juxta (2015, 2016, 2017) The Haiku Foundation’s scholarly journals and, in 2017, Like Light from Bright Hills Press. She has also been published and/or exhibited in Canada, Japan, India, Switzerland, Germany and Great Britain.