Ellen Akins is an American novelist from South Bend, Indiana.
After graduating from LaSalle Intermediate Academy in 1977, Akins earned a Bachelor of Arts in film production at the University of Southern California.
As a young adult, Akins participated in Beyond Our Control, a youth-produced community television program.
Akins then earned a Master of Fine Arts in the creative writing program at Johns Hopkins University.
[2] In April 1993, she was awarded the Academy Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her fiction writing;[3] she has also been given grants by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation,[4] and won the Whiting Award in 1989.