Frances McCue

Frances McCue is poet, writer, arts instigator, and professor. She's the co-writer and co-producer of Where the House Was, a feature documentary about gentrification and poetry as displayed in the tear-down of the old Hugo House. Her poetry books read as novels, taking us through the life of a stenographer who refuses to take dictation (The Stenographer’s Breakfast), or the world of Marrakesh where a tragedy ensues (The Bled). Timber Curtain traces Seattle’s Hugo House building into redevelopment. Her prose books are from the University of Washington Press: The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs, about poet Richard Hugo and the U.S. Pacific Northwest towns he wrote about and Mary Randlett Portraits.  McCue is engaged in new literary start-up: Pulley Press, a poetry imprint that published We Had Our Reasons, winner of the 2023 Washington State Book Award, Man with a Rake by Ted Kooser and Mankiller Poems by the late Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller. Her articles about the intersection of poetry and code appear in Geekwire and The Smart Set. She is a Teaching Professor at the University of Washington where she won the UW Distinguished Teaching Award. Her forthcoming book is Spark and Whistle: Thinking Like a Poet in Leadership and Life from Columbia University Press.