Frances McCue

Frances McCue was born in North Tarrytown, New York in 1962. After her parents’ divorce in 1963, she spent her early years with her grandparents and mother in Cincinnati and on Cape Cod. In 1975, her mother remarried and they moved to Western Pennsylvania. McCue was sent to boarding schools in New England and went on to receive her Bachelor of Arts at the University of New Hampshire. She graduated from the University of Washington with an MFA in creative writing before receiving a Klingenstein Fellowship from Columbia University, where she studied linguistics, English education, architecture, and administrative leadership. She received an EdM in 1996 and an EdD in 2001. She is now a senior lecturer in the English department at the University of Washington.[1]

McCue co-founded Richard Hugo House in 1996, serving as the Founding Director for ten years.[2] Though “Hugo House,” as it has since been renamed, is an arts venue rather than a residence, McCue lived in the building with her husband and daughter during the early years of the literary organization. In 2009, while the family was in Morocco for a University of Washington course, McCue's husband, Seattle activist Gary Greaves, died unexpectedly.[3] His death inspired her 2010 book The Bled. In 2015, McCue began work on Where the House Was, a documentary film weaving together the history of Hugo House, the life and work of poet Richard Hugo, and ongoing gentrification in Seattle. The film is directed by filmmaker Ryan K. Adams and is set for a 2018 release date.[4] Production of the film also inspired McCue's 2017 poetry collection Timber Curtain.[5]

McCue has received grants and residencies from Centrum, Artist Trust, 4Culture,[6] the Whiteley Center at Friday Harbor Laboratories, the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, the Jack Straw Writers Workshop, the University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities, Hedgebrook, and from 1998 to 2002 was an Echoing Green Fellow.[7]

Spanning almost thirty years from Columbia University to the University of Washington, she has won numerous teaching awards. Her work for Richard Hugo House won her an Evergreen State Service Award in 2002 and a 2003 History Makers Award from the Museum of History and Industry.

She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has been a runner-up for the Milliman Prize and a Stranger Genius Award,[8] and has won the Joan Grayston Poetry Prize, Richard Blessing Scholarship, the Bumbershoot Written Works Competition, a GAMMA award, and the Grub Street National Book Prize.

Her first poetry collection, The Stenographer's Breakfast, won the Barnard New Women's Poetry Prize. Her second book, The Bled, won the 2011 Washington State Book Award for poetry. In 2011 and 2015 she was a finalist for the award in the History/General Nonfiction category, first for her book The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs: Revisiting the Northwest Towns of Richard Hugo and then for Mary Randlett Portraits.[9][10]

Frances McCue’s prose has appeared in Ms. Magazine, New York Times Book Review,[11][12] Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Stranger,[13] The Seattle Times, Nest Magazine, Teachers College Record, Seattle Social Justice, Journal of National Collegiate Honors Council, The Georgia Review,[14] Arcade, and Tin House Magazine.[15] She has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Seattle City of Literature (Sasquatch Books, 2015), Wordswest Anthology (Wordswest Press, 2015), Make it True: Poems from Cascadia (Leaf Press, Vancouver BC, 2015), Looking Together (University of Washington Press, 2009), Worlds in Our Words: Contemporary American Women Writers (Prentice Hall, 1997), and For a Living: The Poetry of Work (University of Illinois Press, 1995).

• "Frances McCue", 2006 Jack Straw Writers Program