Colleen J. McElroy was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award for Queen of the Ebony Isles, McElroy’s collection of poems, including Here I Throw Down My Heart, (finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award, the Walt Whitman Award, the Phyllis Wheatley Award, and the Washington State Governor’s Book Award), and Blood Memory (finalist for the 2017 Paterson Poetry Prize). McElroy died at the age of eighty-eight on December 12, 2023.