Colleen J. McElroy is professor emeritus of English and creative writing at the University of Washington. She is the former editor in chief of the literary magazine Seattle Review and has published nine poetry collections, most recently Sleeping with the Moon, for which she received a 2008 PEN/Oakland National Literary Award. Her latest collections of creative nonfiction include A Long Way from St. Louie and Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar, which was a finalist in the 2000 PEN USA Research-based Creative Nonfiction category. She has received the Before Columbus American Book Award, two Fulbright Research Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships (in both fiction and poetry), a DuPont Visiting Scholar Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Fellowship.

Books by Colleen J. McElroy:

Other poems on the web by Colleen J. McElroy:
Seven poems

Colleen J. McElroy According to Wikipedia.

About Here I Throw Down My Heart:

"The always smart and effective poetry of Colleen McElroy becomes seductive in Here I Throw Down My Heart. On topics from marriage to the military to ageing, McElroy’s poems are film noir voodoo magic."
—Diane Wakoski

"Here I Throw Down My Heart is amazing. . . . I’m especially drawn to the [women] warrior poems. That series is magnificent in its tearless awfulness with that note of sweet, appalled regret at the end. One of McElroy’s very best, I think. Having just read about women in combat in the New York Times recently . . . these poems yanked every sad nerve. Kafka says art should mangle us, and McElroy has done it."
—Valerie Trueblood

"We will cross where the borders are porous.’ In McElroy’s Here I Throw Down My Heart, meaning beats a tattoo in four distinct chambers, adding up, magically, to pure connection. Slavery’s echo in modern times, what it means to be a woman in battle, hunger and greed, and a paradise up for grabs . . . ‘if our purse is fat enough.’ These are significant poems that address our complex human condition, in language that illuminates with frankness and beauty."
—Katherine Hastings

"In these poems, Colleen McElroy faces loss that is punishingly never final, that is alive to be lost every haunted moment of the present and promises the hurt of tomorrow more certainly than it can even promise a tomorrow. Yet love would have it this way just yet rather than finally not at all, and her voice remains—even if blues tired—ultimately as smart-mouth and straightforward as ever. Her vision and observation made clearer by the enduring strength of honest attention. Most importantly, these poems reveal that McElroy has not at all been drained of her great compassion; we see it extended into other routes her background might have taken her. Few have spoken of the price women of today’s armed services pay in their increased involvement in the work of war. McElroy, a confessed Army Brat, can talk of the double-edged losses here also. These women, in a sense, are also her children. This is a broad cut swath of a book. It lays wide open a lot of our complacencies."
—Charles Roberson