Elaine Magarrell is the author of two full-length books of poems, On Hogback Mountain (1985), and Blameless Lives (1991), and is one of three contributors to a chapbook of poems on aging, Inventory (2003, with Cicely Angleton and Reed Whittemore). A posthumous third collection of poems, The Madness of Chefs: New & Selected Poems (2017), was edited by Barbara Goldberg, Jean Nordhaus, and Catherine Harnett.
Magarrell was born in Clinton, Iowa of immigrant Jewish parents and came of age in that small town during World War II. Her father owned a ladies’ ready-to-wear shop where the whole family helped out. She was educated at the University of Iowa and Drake University. Magarrell taught English and Creative Writing in Iowa’s public schools, wrote freelance features for The Des Moines Register, and was a researcher for the Washington Bureau of The New York Times during the Watergate hearings and Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations.
Although she wrote poetry from the age of ten, she burned the early work and did not write again until she was in her forties and teaching English in a public junior high school. In 1981, Magarrell quit her job as library clerk at the Washington Bureau of the New York Times to write full time.
The Homes
2131 Tunlaw Rd. NW, Washington, DC
Elaine Magarrell
2131 Tunlaw Rd. NW
Located in Glover Park neighborhood, Northwest- West of Rock Creek