Mickey Ellinger is a free-lance journalist, poet and fiction writer who thinks a lot about place, about the U.S. as a country of the displaced, and about what happens to us, the displaced and the displacers.  With partner photographer Scott Braley she worked with Allensworth elder Mrs. Alice Royal to bring a largely neglected chapter of California history to the reading public.  The book, Allensworth the Freedom Colony, is available from Heyday Books. For some photos click here. She and Scott have also finished a long article on Native views of the Anza expeditions and the settlement of California, available from News from Native California. (for PDFs click Anza.pdf.)

For links to short stories, published and not, go here.  And poetry too. And occasional other stuff.

Ellinger was a member of the Community Health Works editorial team for a textbook for community health workers, Foundations for Community Health Workers, available from Jossey-Bass as part of their Public Health and Health Services series.

With Sharon Martinas she helped organize the Challenging White Supremacy workshops in the early 1990s and was an enthusiastic supporter of CWS throughout its organizational life.  She works with its political successor, the Anne Braden Program of the Catalyst Project. She was a member of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, and is a long-time member of the National Writers Union.

She is also looking for ways to stay in the Bay Area as she gets older, and has joined the Bay Area Community Land Trust.

Check out Scott and Mickey’s March 2010 SF Bay View story on sustainability in Cuba here.