Ellen Ann is a journalist, writer and filmmaker. Her book The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning is being released in 2023. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, The Baffler, Oxford American, Scalawag, Bitter Southerner and Dorothy Parker's Ashes, as well as on Mississippi public radio, where she was a reporter. She produced and co-directed Eyes on Mississippi, a 2016 documentary on iconic civil rights journalist Wilson F. Minor that has screened at universities and institutions across the country. She launched and directs The Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools, an online site that publishes first-person accounts of public and private academy education in the South since 1970-era school desegregation. An MFA from Bennington College, Fentress is a lifelong Mississippian, born in Greenwood. She teaches in the Mississippi University for Women MFA program in creative writing.