All Faculty Profiles
Lyndsey Ellis
by Kasey Noss
Gotham teacher Lyndsey Ellis didn’t mean to be a bridge.
Born in Florissant, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, Lyndsey thought her move to California’s Bay Area for an MFA was a one-way ticket out of the Midwest. But when, twelve years later, she found St. Louis at the center of her debut novel, she felt called to return—this time, for good.
What she found upon her return was a city more “insular” than she remembered, a sort of “reverse culture shock” after all her time on the West coast. And yet, as much as she felt St. Louis was different from California, she “didn’t want to perpetuate the coastal elitism that sometimes comes with living on the coast.”
“It got to the point where I wanted to, you know, not necessarily make myself a bridge intentionally, which is kind of what happened, but I wanted to look at it from both perspectives,” Lyndsey says.
That’s exactly what she did. Her first novel, Bone Broth, which takes place in St. Louis in the wake of the Ferguson unrest, sees one of its main characters return from her activism in the Bay Area to find herself frustrated with her hometown’s ethos. Her essay “Hair” was featured in Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest. Most recently, her upcoming collection of speculative short fiction tells the stories of Black women and girls in the Midwest.
Time and again, Lyndsey has found herself drawn to stories that explore her Midwestern roots through the lens of national and global discourses, bridging the gap between two sides of the country that she has called home.
At Gotham, where Ellis has taught Zoom and Online writing classes from St. Louis since October of 2023, Ellis continues to bridge that gap.
“I just love the diversity of opinion, the diversity of thought, which lends itself to people’s learning experiences as they grow as writers, right?” Lyndsey says of Gotham.
That diversity of thought comes not only from the fact that writers can join her classes from anywhere in the world, but also from any phase of life.
“I think the youngest person has been, like, right out of high school, and the oldest has been, I think, in their 80s.” Lyndsey says of her students.
As a writer who grew up surrounded by elders at her Baptist church, Ellis is passionate about overcoming intergenerational divides. This is reflected not only in projects like Bone Broth, which explores complex family dynamics, but also in her launch of Plain Talk, a workshop series focused on bringing generations together through storytelling.
“I’m curious,” Lyndsey says. “I’m hungry for other people’s perspectives, and just to hear how people think, and they’ll sometimes engage in discourse together.”
This variety of perspective was part of the reason Lyndsey was drawn to teaching at Gotham in the first place.
“I loved the variety that I saw on the website in terms of classes and what they were teaching. I love that everything felt accessible,” Lyndsey says, describing Gotham’s courses as less “stiff” than those she encountered during her MFA. “I don't regret [the MFA], but I also know I'm glad that there are other avenues, and that’s why I love Gotham, because had this been around in my heyday, I would have jumped at the chance to take a few classes.”
