Welcome!

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 work, please visit Insights Collaborative.

“Line by line, Radha cuts her own way toward understanding the deep story she is in, a story we all share.” –William S. Barnes, The Ledgerbook

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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 that statement is dramatic, I do believe that poetry percolates hope and encourages resilience. I’ve witnessed poetry’s healing qualities in every class I’ve ever taught. Poetry is connective, empathy building, and enlivening. It is a welcome counterpoint to the fast and painfully 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 fast and painfully reductive thinking so common to our times.”

Rsig

Winner, New Mexico Book Award in Poetry

Bloodline

“Bloodline is a mesmerizing, intelligent book, full of beauty, science, and ancestry.” –Michael Henry 

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Praise for Bloodline

  • “Bloodline succeeds admirably in beginning to answer the question posed in ‘Project Y’: ‘What can I say to my children / when they find hollow, underground test chambers / in the dry, open spaces of their personal history?’”–New Mexico Magazine 

    Peter BG Shoemaker
    New Mexico Magazine

  • “The legacy of Los Alamos is a rich and challenging subject; by setting it opposite a meditation on desert landscapes, on people in those spaces, Marcum has opened a new window into intractable questions about who we are and what we have done.” –Terrain.org 

    Amy Knight
    Terrain.org

  • “Fusion, fission, breakability, unbreakability, incorruptibility are all themes that the poet works into her lines. This beautiful poetry bears witness without being didactic or overtly political—and its message is clear.” –Poet Lore 

    Anne Harding Woodworth
    Poet Lore

Write With Me

Join me for craft seminars and workshops at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, coaching sessions, and drop-in virtual writing classes.

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Student Feedback

  • “I can’t thank you enough for another great class series.  Everything about the class was great and your class is the hour I look forward to most each week!” 

    Celeste
    Drop-in Class Regular

  • “This was one of the best and most helpful classes I have taken. It was well organized, with helpful details and great examples. Filled me with ideas and spurred me on. Thank you, Radha.”

    Sue
    Lighthouse Student

  • “Excellent class! It covered very important material—and Radha is an intelligent, intuitive instructor. I wish we could have more course offerings from her!”

    Paige
    Lighthouse Student
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Author Bio

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. Other recent awards include 1st prize, Pacifica Literary Review, for “Fission: 1938.” My poems have appeared 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 writing and teaching 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.

Get in touch

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