"With the passion and determination of an abuse survivor, the exploring mind of a naturalist, and the soul energy of a language-loving poet, Akers gives us not one truth but layer on layer of overlapping truths." —Alicia Ostriker 

"I’ve loved Ellery Akers’ poems for a long time, and so am heartened to see this book of carefully wrought considerations about the ways we work at living, enduring, surviving, and finding ways to thrive. Akers struggles to bind the natural with the unnatural, to understand how we are products of the universe, its explosive and violent energy as well as its silence and vastness. And so the child who is broken knows both the blinding rage of betrayal as well the tenderness of a window-trapped tiger moth set back carefully on a leaf. These are the two worlds Akers lives and breathes in, navigating the terror and wonder of each. Practicing the Truth is one of those rare books one can’t stop reading. It’s that good, that compelling." —Dorianne Laux

"Practicing the Truth: A compressed, charged family history, made vivid and convincing by its eloquence about the body, about the need for the mind to make restitution to the past." —Eavan Boland

Ellery Akers’s newest book, A Door into the Wild: Poetry and Art, won the 2024 Blue Light Book Award. Among her previous collections of poetry are Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance (2020), which won Book Authority’s Award for the Best Environmentalism Books of All Time; Practicing the Truth (2015), which won the Autumn House Poetry Prize, an Independent Publisher Book Award, and the San Francisco Book Festival Poetry Award; and Knocking on the Earth (1989), named a Best Book of the Year by the San Jose Mercury News. She is also the author of a children’s novel, Sarah’s Waterfall (2009), which won a NAPPA Award, a Mom’s Choice (Gold) Award, and a Skipping Stones Award. Among her other honors are the Poetry International Prize, the John Masefield Award, Sierra magazine’s Nature Writing Award, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, and Headlands Center for the Arts. She lives on the Northern California coast and teaches private poetry workshops.