Ellen Airgood

Ellen Airgood writes fiction shaped by Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where she has long run a diner in Grand Marais. The Education of Ivy Blake is a middle-grade companion to Prairie Evers, following Ivy as her mother’s neglect and instability disrupt a safer life with her friend Prairie’s family. Art, observation, and small daily pleasures help Ivy imagine a future she can help shape. Tin Camp Road: A Novel turns to Laurel Hill and her ten-year-old daughter Skye, whose precarious life near Lake Superior becomes more fragile after an eviction. Riverhead Books published that novel in 2021, while Nancy Paulsen Books published Ivy’s story in 2015. Across both works, Airgood treats rural poverty, housing insecurity, caregiving, and community without reducing her characters to hardship. Her detailed sense of distance, weather, work, and neighborly dependence comes from decades in the region. One book centers a child seeking dependable family; the other follows a mother and daughter deciding what home and independence can realistically mean.