Fire in My Head / Flame in My Heart: Poems for the Pyrocene

Ellen Girardeau Kempler is an award-winning nonfiction writer, photographer, and poet whose work has been extensively published in print and online. In 2024, one of her poems was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” her chapbook, Thirty Views of a Changing World, was published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press. A 2021 recipient of a Fostering Creativity in a Time of Crisis Grant from the city of Laguna Beach, California, Kempler established a poetry trail through downtown. It features short poems by community members in response to public art. She helps coordinate the Laguna Beach Library’s annual poetry contest and judges poetry submissions for Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Programs’ annual international student scholarship contest. With a master’s degree in mass communication, sh