Ellis Avery, the author of critically acclaimed works including the novels The Last Nude and The Teahouse Fire, died February 15. She was 46. Avery was also the author of a poetry collection, and two memoirs, The Smoke Week and The Family Tooth. Her novels received awards from the American Library Association and the Golden Crown Literary Society, and her debut novel, The Teahouse Fire, was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. Her work has been translated into seven languages.
Broken Rooms, her first volume of poetry, featured selections from a year's worth of haiku, paired with images by sculptor Will Corwin. In 2017, she began to collect each year's haiku into an annually published datebook. To foster writing that brought the same attention to writing about place that she brought to her daily haiku, in 2014 Avery founded and edited a column on the Public Books website called Public Streets.
"All of my work has been about the transformative power of attention," Avery wrote. "Attention is the heat that fires the raw clay of research and daydream into fiction. A tea master's meditative attention turns eating and drinking into a ritual performance; a painter's sexual attention turns a model into a lover. And the attention required to write a haiku every day for fifteen years turns life into a treasure hunt."
Lambda Literary wrote that "the community will mourn the loss of this phenomenal talent."