Elicia Brown Pomeroy ’90


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Elicia Brown (Pomeroy) ’90, journalist and essayist, died in August, at the age of 48, of ovarian cancer.


Elicia was many things—a parent of two children, a spouse, a runner, a professional who wrote for a variety of publications, including Barnard Magazine; she served as a contributor here for many years.

Elicia was someone who felt closely tied to both Barnard and the Magazine, says friend and classmate Marna Berkman Tolchin. “She was very proud of the College and felt a strong connection to other people who went to Barnard, not just our class.” That sense of attachment followed her throughout her days, even during her illness, to the hospital, where she continued to run when able. “One day, when I was accompanying Elicia on her laps,” her husband, Jeremy Pomeroy, recalls, “a patient behind her gave her a look of recognition. It turned out to be an instructor whose writing course Elicia had taken at Barnard all those years ago—a fortuitous meeting and a bittersweet coincidence.”


While journalism was her profession, her essays about living with illness were some of her most evocative work. “My own familiar world collapsed in the course of a few days,” she wrote in a piece published last fall in The Forward. “Last year during the [high] holidays, I sat in the pews in the balcony of my Upper West Side synagogue, scrawnier and weaker than I had been in my adult life….The words of the High Holy Days’ supplication, Unetanah Tokef, cut me sharply: ‘Who will live and who will die? Who in their time, and who not in their time?’”


Elicia Brown Pomeroy, still full of hope, ideas, and plans for the future, died long before her time. Here at the Magazine, and among her classmates, friends, relatives, and colleagues, she will be sorely missed.