Mary Fell

Mary Fell was born on 22 September 1947 at Worcester City Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father, Paul Fell, was an Irish American Worcester native who worked as a custodian for the city, served on the city Retirement Board and was its chairman by the time of his death. Her mother, Elizabeth "Betty" Fell, had moved to Worcester from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, during the Great Depression to look for work.

She grew up mostly in the Main South neighbourhood with her older brother, Paul. After kindergarten at Downing Street School she attended St. Peter's school through high school. The family never owned a car, and her memories of the city included skating in Elm Park and the Charity Circus at the Worcester Auditorium. Although she was born after the Second World War, the war was a constant presence in her childhood and later in her poems.

She studied English at Worcester State College, where she began writing poetry, and graduated in 1969. She later said that the women's movement of the 1970s helped her see that she could write about the life and people she had grown up with.

After college Fell worked for about five years as a social worker for the Welfare Department and then on a city social service project. In 1975 she and the Worcester poet Fran Quinn began touring local schools, reading poetry and leading workshops for teachers. She returned to social work until 1977, when she entered the Master of Fine Arts programme at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her MFA in 1981.

She then went to Indiana University East in Richmond, Indiana, to fill in for a professor on sabbatical, and the position became permanent. Over more than 30 years there she taught English, mentored junior faculty, helped to revise and diversify the curriculum and built a creative writing programme. She received the Helen Lees Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1997, the Sylvia E. Bowman Award, Indiana University's award for distinguished teaching, in 2001, and the IU East Chancellor's Faculty Award in 2010. She retired as professor emerita of English.

Her collection The Persistence of Memory was selected for the National Poetry Series in 1983 and published by Random House in 1984. It drew on her own experience of working class Worcester, with poems such as Out of Luck, Massachusetts, about the decline of the mill town of Ware, and Basic Training and American Legion, about the shadow of the war. The book also contained The Triangle Fire, a sequence about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York, in which 146 workers died. It had first been published in 1983 as a hand sewn limited edition chapbook by Shadow Press. Her poems and essays also appeared in journals including Columbia, Tendril and the Worcester Review.

Fell lived for many years in Richmond, Indiana. Her obituary described her as a dear friend to many and as the beloved stepmother of Michelle Cheatem and Micah Brewer, and step-grandmother of Jamison and Kaydence. Her family asked that, in place of flowers, donations be made to Abby's House, a non-profit organisation in Worcester, or to A Better Way in Richmond.

Mary Fell died on 18 October 2026, aged 79, after a long struggle with Alzheimer's disease, according to the obituary published by Stegall Berheide Orr Funeral Home in Richmond, Indiana. The obituary closed with her short poem Opening. A celebration of life was arranged for 7 November 2026 at 3pm in the Community Room of Friends Fellowship, 2030 Chester Boulevard, Richmond.

Fell belonged to a generation of Worcester poets who wrote about ordinary working lives, and The Triangle Fire has been discussed alongside other writing on the 1911 disaster, including in Janet Zandy's essay on Triangle Fire poetry for the Modern American Poetry project. Her life and work were recorded by the Worcester Writers' Project's A City of Words. At Indiana University East she is remembered for decades of teaching and for helping to build its creative writing programme.