About

Radha Marcum is a poet, writer, editor, and teacher with a focus on the intersection of the environment, culture, and personal history. She is the recipient of the 2023 Washington Prize for her forthcoming collection, Pine Soot Tendon Bone (The Word Works, 2024). Marcum's first poetry collection, Bloodline (3: A Taos Press, 2017), which delves into her grandfather's involvement in building the first atomic bombs in New Mexico during World War II, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry in 2018. 

 

Her poetry is informed by the landscapes of the physical world and the mind, and is featured in journals such as North American Review, FIELD, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, The Bennington Review, and numerous others. Working as a prose writer with a focus on health and environment, Marcum has written for American Rivers, Colorado Water Trust, Outside, and The Wilderness Society, among other organizations.

 

A graduate of Bennington College and the University of Washington, Seattle, where she held the Klepser Fellowship in Poetry, Marcum has received accolades for individual works, including 1st prize in Pacifica Literary Review's poetry contest, judged by Linda Bierds, and a 2023 Folio Award for excellence in journalism. Her collections have been finalists for the FIELD Poetry Prize, the Alice James Beatrice Hawley Award, the Akron Poetry Prize, and the Persea Books Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize. For excellence in poetry instruction, she was nominated for the Webber Teaching Award at the University of Washington, Seattle.  

She offers individual coaching in poetry manuscript development and publication strategy, and she teaches classes and workshops at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop and at other organizations and conferences. She is the founder of Poet to Poet, an interview series, newsletter, and community that explores the path from writing to publishing poetry.

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With a writing practice deeply rooted in the ecological, social, and personal landscapes of the American West, Marcum remains dedicated to serving literary and environmental communities through her work. She lives in Colorado.