• High school English teacher
• English MA student at UNL
• Speech and slam poetry coach
• NSCTA member
• 2024 Young Writers Camp Instructor

Grace Ellis’s time with the Nebraska Writing Project began as a student in high school participating in a place-based writing retreat hosted by NeWP. She was later able to attend the Summer Institute in 2023 before returning to the Advanced Institute in 2024. Alongside her participation in the Nebraska Writing Project, Grace currently serves as a high school English teacher, assistant speech coach, and head slam poetry coach at Fairbury Jr./Sr. High School where she began teaching in 2022. Grace feels very fortunate to have been able to bring slam poetry to Fairbury in the form of an All Writes Reserved team, which is a program of the Nebraska Writers Collective. In her 5 years of coaching both slam poetry and speech, Grace has found just how important of an outlet writing can be for students. These experiences have only served to further prove one of her guiding principles in the classroom and in life: stories have both a long history and a bright future in connecting us a human beings. That connection manifests itself in the things we both read and write about. As a teacher, Grace has found immense joy in watching her students’ stories unfold through their writing. Whether it is a daily quick write, a creative short story, a personal narrative, or an argumentative essay, Grace truly believes that all forms of writing serve to fulfill our innate human needs to connect, to be heard, and to be remembered. She hopes that by centering this core belief in her classroom, her students will find that other necessary skills such as problem solving, effective communication, empathy, and meta-cognitive skills innately follow.