English: Readings and Lectures: Colleen McElroy

A poet and short story writer with an intense sense of place, Colleen McElroy was born in S t. Louis to Ruth Celeste and Purcia Purcell Rawls. After her parents divorced in 1938, McElroy and her mother moved in with her grandmother, whose full-length boudoir mirror and wind-up Victrola began what McElroy has called "her romance with language." In 1943 her mother married an army sergeant, Jesse Dalton Johnson, and McElroy began the life of an "army brat," moving often. By the time she was twenty-one, she had lived in St. Louis; Wyoming; Munich, Germany, where she attended college; and Kansas City, where she received her B.A. After studying in the speech and hearing program at the University of Pittsburgh, she returned to Kansas City and did graduate work in neurological and language learning patterns, married, had two children, and was divorced. She then migrated to Washington State and became the director of Speech and Hearing Services at Western Washington University. After receiving a Ph.D. in ethnolinguistic patterns of dialect differences and oral traditions from the University of Washington, McElroy became a professor of English at that university. As her poems dramatize, she has traveled extensively, to Europe, South America, Japan, Majorca, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

It was in her thirties that McElroy started writing seriously. She lived in Bellingham, Washington, the home of many writers. At the same time that she was receiving encouragement to write from poets such as Richard Hugo, Robert Huff, and Denise Levertov, she was also discovering the works of black poets such as Langston Hughes, Joseph S. Cotter, Anne Spencer, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Margaret Walker. Both her realization that Keats and Yeats need not be her only role models and her developing passion for the landscape of the Pacific Northwest-- the mountains, the ocean, the rain-triggered the writing of her first poems, works that would be collected in 1973 chapbook, The Mules Done Long Since Gone. Another collection, Winters without Snow, was published in 1979; McElroy acknowledges that it details the pain of her second divorce. In 1983, McElroy became the first black woman to be promoted to full professor at the University of Washington. Also that year her collection Queen of the Ebony Isles was selected for the Wesleyan University Press Poetry Series. Queen would receive the American Book Award in 1985.

Since 1985 McElroy has published two short-story collections and two poetic memoirs. In addition, she has demonstrated a talent for drama, writing with Ishmael Reed the choreopoem The Wild Gardens of the Loup Garou as well as the play Follow the Drinking Gourd, about Harriet Tubman, and many television scripts. One measure of her increasing importance as a poet is the publication of her What Madness Brought Me Here: Collected Poems, 1968-1988. Throughout her career, travel and coming face to face with the new remain crucial themes for McElroy. As she herself has said, "Each piece of writing is a new port of call, full of surprises and disappointments, pleasures and intrigue."

(This biography is borrowed from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, pp. 2212-2213, via Ms. McElroy's own web pages.)