Ella was born in 1991 and grew up in northern New South Wales before moving to Brisbane in 2009.

She is the author of the poetry collection Dead Bolt (2020), which won the Anne Elder Award, given annually to the best debut book of poems by an Australian poet, the Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poems, and was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award.

Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies including The Kenyon Review, Ambit, Amsterdam Review, Best Australian Poems, HEAT, Meanjin and many others. She has undertaken residencies at Varuna, the Writer’s House in Katoomba NSW, as well as at Monson Arts in Maine, USA.

Her criticism and essays have appeared in Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books and Westerly, and she is the recipient of a Queensland Writers Fellowship, a Red Room Poetry Fellowship, a Mick Dark Fellowship for Environmental Writing, and a Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award. In 2022, she was the guest editor of Rabbit Poetry‘s ARCHITECTURE issue.

She holds a doctorate in creative writing from Queensland University of Technology, for which she received the university’s Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award.