author
Marjorie Allen Seiffert
1885–1970
A prizewinning American poet with a knack for reinvention, she published widely in major literary magazines and sometimes wrote under playful alternate names. Her career moved between serious lyric work, lighter verse, and even a famous modernist hoax.
1 Audiobook
A Woman of Thirty
by Marjorie Allen Seiffert
About the author
Born in Moline, Illinois, in 1885, she graduated from Smith College in 1906 and later returned to her hometown. She began writing poetry around 1915, encouraged by her friend Arthur Davison Ficke, and went on to build a substantial publishing career.
Her poems appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, and Others. In 1919, she won Poetry's Levinson Prize for the best American poem of the year. She also wrote under pseudonyms, notably Angela Cypher and Elijah Hay.
That second pen name linked her to the Spectrist literary hoax, a spoof movement created in 1916. Alongside her magazine work, she published books such as A Woman of Thirty, Ballads of the Singing Bowl, The King with Three Faces, and The Name of Life. She died in 1970.