Poet, writer, editor, translator, journalist, photographer, occasional mentor, Elisavietta Ritchie's work is widely published in the United States and abroad. Her early collection, Tightening the Circle Over Eel Country, won the Great Lakes Colleges' Association for First Books of Poetry in 1975-76, and several individual poems and stories have received awards. Long unofficially involved with writers and poets in exile and immigration/emigration, she has translated poems from Russian, French, Malay-Indonesian, and with the help of native speakers, from other languages. Her own work has been translated into a dozen languages. The United States Information Agency sponsored her readings and meetings with local poets and writers in Brazil, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, the Former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Russia, Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana. She has also lived, studied and worked in France, Cyprus, Lebanon, Malaysia, Canada and Australia. After her poetry manuscript Raking the Snow won a competition for the collaborative Washington Writers' Publishing House in 1982, she served for three years as president when the press published only poetry. When in 1999 WWPH held its premiere fiction competition and In Haste I Write You This Note: Stories & Half-Stories, was a winner, she served for a decade as co-president then president of the fiction division, until new winners were available to take over the Press, helping new generations bring their own manuscripts into print. Ritchie's poems have inspired several composers, notably David Owens, Jackson Berkey, David L. Brunner and Halim El-Dabh. The chapbook Feathers, Or, Love on the Wing is a collaboration with visual artists Megan Richard and Suzanne Shelden. She is a founder, with Myra Sklarew, of A Splendid Wake, an ongoing organization to honor over a century of now deceased poets who have lived and worked in the Greater Washington area. She continues to lead creative writing workshops for adults and children, sometimes serves as a mentor for other writers, and occasional poet-in-the-schools. In past years a free-lance writer and photographer for the New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor, now she photographs and writes articles for The Bay Weekly, which covers the Chesapeake Bay area. The house in Washington DC, shared with her husband, journalist, writer and amateur violinist Clyde H. Farnsworth, is a frequent gathering place for writers and musicians, and a second home for numerous young scholars of many nationalities. Ritchie and Farnsworth as often live, work and host writers, artists and musicians in an isolated old farm house beside the Patuxent River in Southern Maryland.
