Elaine Magarrell (b. 1928) The Joy of Cooking LINKS No links found. BIOGRAPHY Elaine Magarrell (b. 1928) Born in Clinton, Iowa, of immigrant Jewish parents, she came of age in this 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. 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. On Hogback Mountain (1985), her first book of poetry, won the Washington Writers' Publishing House Prize, and her subsequent book, Blameless Lives (1991), won the Word Works Prize. Her fiction and poetry appear in a number of literary journals, and she is a four-time recipient of grants in literature from the District of Columbia Commission on Arts and Humanities.