Jerry Ellis

As a child, Jerry Ellis grew up in the Southern Appalachian mountains in a three-room house without indoor plumbing. At the age of 17, he left home to hitchhike to New York. As both a Cherokee and a Southerner, this trek inspired Jerry to live a life of adventure, believing that the experience of meeting people from all walks of life was the master teacher.

Ellis’ Cherokee Great-Grandmother, Margaret Painter  c. 1860

By the age of 26, Jerry had thumbed enough miles to circle the globe five times. An aspiring writer, he kept journals about his travels and people he met. He was inspired by John Steinbeck’s dignity of the common man in Grapes of Wrath, and Jack Kerouac’s philosophy of embracing the moment in On the Road. From the swamps of Louisiana to the rolling, golden wheat fields of Kansas and the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado to the cliff-crashing waves of California, the landscape of America filled his soul.

His first book, Walking the Trail, One Man’s Journey Along the Cherokee Trail of Tears, was published in 1991 by Delacorte Press and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.  A Cherokee, he was the first person in the modern world to walk in reverse the 900-mile route, from Oklahoma to Alabama, where 4,000 of his ancestors died in 1838.

Jerry Ellis has lectured about WALKING and the history of the Cherokee in schools around the world, including Asia, Africa, Europe and throughout the U.S.  As a speaker/consultant he is represented by Speakers Platform in San Francisco (www.speaking.com), which lists him as one of America’ leading college speakers. His literary agent in New York is Linda Konner (ldkonner@cs.com).

 

Since WALKING was published, he has had three other non-fiction books published by Delacorte Press and Ballantine. All books are in print: On the Trail of the Pony Express (hardcover, paperback), Marching Through Georgia (hardcover, paperback, audio book) and Walking to Canterbury (paperback).

 

He has written for The New York Times, had five plays produced and received grants from the National Endowments for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. He speaks Spanish and Italian and  lives in both Fort Payne, Alabama and Rome, Italy. He is the co-founder of Tanager Retreat International, A Place to Embrace the Extraordinary in Life, Business and Art.