Colleen McElroy (1935-2023) was an American poet, short story writer, editor, and memoirist. Rising to prominence at a time when few Black female poets were visible in the Pacific Northwest, McElroy would become a prolific writer and dominant force in the American poetry world. She became the first Black woman to become a full-time faculty member at the University of Washington, and helped hundreds of students hone their voice, shepherding future generations of writers and artists. She graduated from Kansas State University (1958) and from the University of Washington with a Ph.D. (1973). McElroy was known for imbuing her writing with musicality and global perspective. Stories from her travels abroad mingled with excavations of her family history, as she spun threads in search of themes and emotions that transcended the individual.
Over the course of her life, she published 16 books and poetry collections, which included Winters without Snow (1979); Queen of the Ebony Isles (1984), winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; What Madness Brought Me Here: New and Selected Poems, 1968–1988 (1990); Travelling Music (1998); and Sleeping with the Moon (2007), winner of the 2008 PEN Oakland National Literary Award. She was also a painter and a devoted dancer.
Few topics were off-limits for McElroy. She tackled thorny subjects — war, family, race, death, sex, aging, guilt, love, estrangement, legacy, abortion, homelessness, lynchings in the South, and environmental catastrophe. Just before the pandemic, she completed her final manuscript, a poetry collection she titled Done. She continued to write new pieces of poetry during lockdown, keeping busy even as her health declined.
In 1994, Ada Limón took her first poetry class under McElroy as an undergraduate student. Limón recalled how seriously McElroy took her work, believing that poetry “was not just an art form, but a dedication for your whole life.” Limón followed McElroy’s advice to pursue a career in poetry, and with a letter of recommendation from McElroy, would go on to attend NYU. In 2022, Limón was named the 24th U.S. poet laureate.
Outside her professional work as a poet, McElroy was an avid explorer. She rode a Harley-Davidson across the Australian desert, dived in the Fiji Islands, drove shoulder-to-shoulder with lions in Tanzania. She visited ancient cities and holy places.
McElroy won a Fulbright fellowship to travel to Yugoslavia in 1988, and five years later, won a second Fulbright fellowship to go to Madagascar. There, she documented the origin myths and oral traditions of the Malagasy people as an ethnographer. She would go on to share her travels in her 1997 book A Long Way from St. Louie, and her 2001 book Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar.
According to The Seattle Times, peeling away the stereotypes of what it meant to be a Black woman in America would be a consistent theme in McElroy’s work. She championed writing with precision, not only to illuminate truths of the human condition, but to also contribute to a collective effort of social change. McElroy was also an outspoken critic of the literary world’s racial bias against writers of color, particularly for literary awards and recognition.
