director of speech and hearing services at Western
Washington State University (WWS), Bellingham.
Seduced by academic life, she enrolled in courses
at WWS and subsequently entered the doctoral
program at the University of Washington (UW),
where she completed her degree in 1973; she
joined UW’s faculty the same year. After relocating
to Washington, she married poet David McElroy,
who adopted her children.
“A late bloomer,” by her own admission, McEl-
roy was in her 30s when she began writing seri-
ously. While she was an emerging writer living in
the Pacific Northwest, other writers in the region,
including Richard Hugo, John Logan, Knute Skin-
ner, Robert Huff, and Denise Levertov, encour-
aged her. During this time, she also discovered and
devoured the works of African-American writers
such as LANGSTON HUGHES, JOSEPH S. COTTER, ANN
SPENCER, ROBERT HAYDEN, MARGARET WALKER,
and GWENDOLYN BROOKS. Later, when she moved
to Seattle, she met other African-American writ-
ers and, through the United Black Artists Guild,
she formed relationships with ISHMAEL REED, AL
YOUNG, and JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN. Her early ex-
periences in the Pacific Northwest influenced her
first chapbook, The Mules Done Long Since Been
Gone (1973). Three years later, she published
Music from Home: Selected Poems (1976), a collec-
tion of poems in which McElroy, as she often does,
focuses on the locales and people of St. Louis. In a
subsequent volume, Winters without Snow (1979),
she details the pain of her divorce from her second
husband, David McElroy.
During the next two decades, McElroy emerged
as an acclaimed African-American writer, demon-
strating her poetic skill and productivity and pub-
lishing six more volumes of poetry and another
chapbook. Uniquely, however, her writings tran-
scend the long-standing but often oversimplified
black versus universal dichotomy: While she em-
braces the African-American literary tradition in
all of its complexities, she often extends beyond
it, exploring new subjects and links in the human
continuum.
Like many African-American writers, McElroy
is intensely autobiographical, drawing liberally on
her life experiences. In such poems as “Caledonia”
in Lie and Say You Love Me and “Tapestries” in
Queen of the Ebony Isles, for example, she focuses
on the potency of a caring black family life and
the strength of black people, two major themes
in her writing. In Bone Flames and What Mad-
ness Brought Me Here, such masterful poems as
“Years That Teach What Days Don’t Even Know,
“Foul Line—1987,” “Webs and Weeds,” and “Amen
Sister” reveal her skillful use of African-American
history and folk traditions to anchor her narra-
tives. In Traveling Music, she extends the ethos of
her early years in St. Louis to other locales.
As she developed her poetic craft, McElroy
also broadened her interests as a writer. In 1976
she participated in a Breadloaf Writers’ Workshop
led by John Gardner, expanding her interest to fic-
tion. During this period, she also became an ac-
complished writer of television scripts and plays,
earning membership in both the Writers Guild
and the Dramatists Guild. In 1982 she collabo-
rated with Ishmael Reed on a Choreopoem play,
The Wild Gardens of the Loup Garou, and in 1987
she wrote Follow the Drinking Gourd, a play about
Harriet Tubman. That same year, capitalizing on
her Breadloaf Workshop experience, McElroy
published her first collection of short stories, Jesus
and Fat Tuesday and Other Stories, and in 1990 she
published her second volume of stories, Driving
under the Cardboard Pines.
Though primarily a poet, McElroy incorporates
her characteristic poetic sensibility, lyrical prose,
humor, and deft description into her fiction. In
the 29 stories included in Jesus and Fat Tuesday
and Other Stories and Driving under the Cardboard
Pines, she presents a panorama of characters—
outlaws, pimps, prostitutes, strippers, lesbians,
family matrons, undertakers, gang members, and
futuristic lab technicians. McElroy’s stories tran-
scend time and geographical boundaries. Within
her fictional borders, however, McElroy focuses
on the psychological and social divides—conflicts
between black and white, young and old, female
and male, and traditional and contemporary. Set
mostly in the Midwest in the early 20th century, the
stories in Jesus and Fat Tuesday illustrate McElroy’s
treatment of psychological and social issues that
divide individuals and communities. “A Brief SpellMcElroy, Colleen Johnson 345