Ellyn Maybe is the author of The Cowardice of Amnesia (2.13.61), The Ellyn Maybe Coloring Book (Sacred Beverage), Putting My 2 Cents In, Walking Barefoot in the Glassblowers Museum (Manic D Press), Praha and the Poet and A Talk With Nature. She also has a CD, Ellyn Maybe Live. 

She has read all over the country, including Bumbershoot,the Poetry Project, the New School, Taos Poetry Circus, South by Southwest, Lollapalooza, Albuquerque Poetry Festival and Seattle Poetry Festival.  She has also read in Europe at the Bristol Poetry Festival, on the BBC, and in poetry slams and readings in Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Stuttgart.  She opened the MTV Spoken Wurd Tour in Los Angeles.  In addition, she has also read at USC, UCLA, CSUN and Cal State Fullerton, among other colleges. 

Writer’s Digest named her one of ten poets to watch in the new millennium.  Her work has been included in many anthologies, including Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, Poetry Slam, Another City: Writing From Los Angeles, Poetry Nation, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and American Poetry: The Next Generation.  She was on the 1998 and 1999 Venice Beach Slam teams.  She was seen reading her work in Michael Radford’s (Il Postino) film Dancing at the Blue Iguana. 

Rodeo for the Sheepish- Ellyn Maybe is an irresistible force. To read or listen to her poetry is to be gently and completely crushed while simultaneously inspired and charmed. The honesty with which she so exquisitely reveals her vulnerabilities, desires and pain is beautiful and rare.

Rodeo for the Sheepish has so many great moments. The first time I listened to it, I was reminded of when I first met her many years ago and how much I liked her and her poetry. One of the stand out tracks on the album, There Were Two Girls Who Looked A Lot The Same, is a perfect example of why one becomes a fan of Ellyn’s immediately. I can’t understand how anyone could not find an aspect of themselves in that piece. This is what Ellyn does so well and so often in her work and on this album.

Reading Ellyn’s poems from the page is one thing but hearing her read them just the way she meant them to be heard is something else altogether. Ellyn has a great sense of humor and reads wonderfully. The musical accompaniment on the album is not mere background filler but a true collaborative effort between Ellyn and the musicians that really works. Ellyn is a very gifted writer and a true gem. - Henry Rollins

Real Life Rock Top Ten – by Greil Marcus

(1) Ellyn Maybe: Rodeo for the Sheepish (Hen House Studios). I heard half of the long, quietly mesmerizing “City Streets” on the radio—what was this? A woman with a poem, with music and a sung chorus not behind her but circling her, and the poem neither exactly recited nor sung, but spoken with such a lilt, in a voice so full of miserabilist pride—at forty, a woman is still getting high-school insults tossed at her (“Hey Mars girl,” a man shouts on the street, “get off the Earth”)—that it’s music in and of itself. There is no bottom to Maybe’s inventiveness, to her adoption of Nirvana’s Oh well whatever never mind as an artistic tool, to a confidence that allows her to toss off a bedrock statement on the American character (“There are people / who know the cuckoo is the state bird / of most states of mind”) in a throwaway voice so that its humor hits you not as a joke but as an echo. There is nothing like this album except for the real life it maps.

I have started to write something about you for your site several times, and each time I am struck by my inability to describe what you do in terms beautiful enough, original enough to do you justice. But it’s always been this way. Who has ever been able to say in other words what a song says? Maybe it’s why I like your poems so much, they say what can only be said in exactly the way you say it. The best way of turning someone on to you is to play you for them. – Jackson Browne