Ellen Girardeau KemplerEllen Girardeau Kempler is an award-winning nonfiction writer and poet. After a 25-year career in nonprofit communications, a layoff inspired her to enroll in a poetry workshop in Ireland and launch her website, Gold Boat Journeys (Creative Cultural ravel). Since then, she has organized trips around events such as writers' conferences, book and music festivals and literary anniversaries and holidays. An active environmentalist, she champions sustainable, culturally immersive, car-free travel. In the past few years, her wanderings have taken her to Chile, Israel, Jordan, Iceland, Germany, West Africa, France, Ireland, Canada, Costa Rica, Mexico, Japan and around the U.S. Her poems have been published in Cargo Literary, Gold Man Review; Phoenix Rising Review, Orbis International Poetry Quarterly, Spectrum and a number of other small presses. They have also been shortlisted for the Tom Howard and Margaret Reid Poetry Award, the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Prize and Fish Poetry Prize, and have won three first-place awards and one second-place award in the annual Laguna Beach Library Poetry Contest. In 2016 one of her poems won Ireland's Blackwater International Poetry Prize. Her travel writing, essays, opinion pieces and feature articles have appeared in The Atlantic, L.A. Times, Christian Science Monitor, Huffington Post, Culture Trip, Transitions Abroad, Westways and numerous other publications. Based in Laguna Beach, California, she enjoys hiking, gardening, baking, reading and volunteering for theaters and other community groups. She believes in poetry's power to reach hearts, change minds and move people to action. Thirty Views of a Changing World is her first book. Read More Read Less