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Thanks for dropping by my author website. Here you’ll find my current work, opportunities to write with me, and more. Have a query? Please contact me directly. For my content strategy and communications consulting business, please visit Insights Collaborative.
“Quote will go here!” – Associated Press
I started writing on my mom’s Hermes 2000 typewriter when I was seven.
Since then, I have made it my life’s work to tap language’s power to unite hearts and minds, whether through writing poems or by being a voice for innovation in health, environment, and business.
William Carlos Williams famously said, “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” Although his statement is certainly dramatic, I do believe that the discoveries we make through poetry help us cultivate hope and resilience. I’ve witnessed this ordinary magic in every class I’ve ever taught. Poetry is connective, empathy building, and enlivening. It is a welcome counterpoint to the painfully quick, reductive thinking so common to our times. Writing poems helps us embrace the fluid, paradoxical nature of living, to find insight on the grandest scales and in the simplest details. For those reasons, I take a poet’s mindset into everything I do.
Why Poetry
“Poetry is connective, empathy building, and enlivening. It is a welcome counterpoint to the painfully quick, reductive thinking so common to our times.”
Winner, New Mexico Book Award in Poetry
“Some stories have long half-lives. Radha Marcum’s beautiful first collection of poems, Bloodline, describes the personal impact of her grandfather’s participation in the Manhattan Project. Bloodline is both elegy and reconciliation. Like the ghosts diving for bells throughout this work, there is a deeply haunting quality to Marcum’s poetry—(you’ll remember this)/like dust from a blanket. Or—All afternoon the heart/drops notches/blue and then bluer. And always, the Rocky Mountain West is solace and frame and crucial. Her landscape is closely and truly observed, resonant with meaning. Line by line, Marcum cuts her own way toward understanding the deep story she is in, a story we all share.”
—William S. Barnes, The Ledgerbook
Winner, New Mexico Book Award in Poetry
Bloodline
“Bloodline is a mesmerizing, intelligent book, full of beauty, science, and ancestry.” –Michael Henry
Write With Me
Join me for craft seminars and workshops at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, coaching sessions, and drop-in virtual writing classes.
Student Feedback
About the Author
I studied writing at Bennington College (BA) and the University of Washington, Seattle (MFA), where I received the Klepser Fellowship in Poetry. Bloodline, my first collection, was awarded the 2018 New Mexico Book Award, and other recent awards include “Fission: 1938” 1st prize, Pacifica Literary Review. My poems appear in FIELD, West Branch, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Iris, Chelsea, The Bellingham Review, Poetry Northwest, The Taos Journal of International Art and Poetry, and other journals, and I have been a finalist for the FIELD Poetry Prize, the Alice James Beatrice Hawley Award, the Akron Poetry Prize, and the Persea Books Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize. In addition to poetry, I have written for the Wilderness Society and other environmental nonprofits as well as Outside, Outdoor Retailer, Women’s Adventure, Yoga Journal, and many other magazines.