Marci Rich

”With her colorful tales of Elyria's local history …
Rich gives her readers the sense of being there.
[Her] love of her town shines throughout her writing.”
— The Cleveland Press Club

If an American city could write its autobiography, it would be Looking Back at Elyria. More than a book of local history, Looking Back is a multi-voiced memoir, combining elements of journalism and historical research. Its lens is focused on midcentury—an innocent time when children walked by themselves to the library or the corner store and milk was delivered in glass bottles to the kitchen door. With chapters featuring the city’s beloved Cascade Park, the day presidential candidate John F. Kennedy came to town, and the effect of the Vietnam War on its citizens, Looking Back at Elyria captures a time when America was poised on the bridge between innocence and experience.

This award-winning blog, named by The Huffington Post as one of the top seven blogs for the over-50 set in 2012, represents what Marci Rich calls her first published writing "off-the-leash." Before starting her blog in 2011 (and with it, her freelance writing career), Marci was director of communications for the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

Marci Rich has twice won awards as a best freelance writer in Ohio from the Cleveland Press Club for her "Look Back, Elyria," feature series for the Chronicle-Telegram. When she lived in Richmond, Virginia, she freelanced for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Marci (Janas) Rich earned an Academy of American Poets College Prize while a student at Oberlin College. Her publications include a poetry chapbook, Lights and Shadows (Bottom Dog Press, 1985); Looking Back at Elyria: A Midwest City at Midcentury (The History Press, 2019); and poems in Offcourse, FIELD, Timbuktu, Synaesthetic, and the Abiko Quarterly (Japan). A two-time winner of an Excellence in Journalism award from the Press Club of Cleveland, she lives in Northeast Ohio.