Pine, Soot, Tendon, Bone by Radha Marcum is the winner of the 2023 Washington Prize. Marcum will receive the prize of $1,500 and the book will be published early in 2024.
Marcum is the 50th winner of this distinguished annual literary award! We look forward to launching the book at the AWP Conference and Bookfair in Kansas City.
The panel of five judges met to debate twelve finalists chosen from the pool of 413 manuscript submissions. This year’s final judges were Karren Alenier, Andrea Carter Brown (Series Editor), Jacqueline Johnson, JoAnne Mc Farland, and Nils Michals.
Radha Marcum’s writing is rooted in the wild and industrialized landscapes of the American West. Born in rural southern California and raised in the Central Valley, she has lived in Colorado for over twenty years. Her collection Bloodline received the 2018 New Mexico–Arizona Book Award in Poetry.
Marcum’s poems appear frequently in journals including Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, and Poetry Northwest. She is a graduate of Bennington College and the University of Washington, Seattle, where she held the Klepser Fellowship in Poetry.
Working as a prose writer with a focus on health and environment, Radha has written for Outside, as well as for organizations such as American Rivers, Colorado Water Trust, and The Wilderness Society, among others.
The founder of Poet to Poet, a community for poets writing books, she teaches privately and at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop.