Frances McCue

Frances McCue is an American poet, writer, and teacher based in the Pacific Northwest. She has published four books of poetry and two books of prose. Her poetry collection The Bled (Factory Hollow Press, 2010) received the 2011 Washington State Book Award and the 2011 Grub Street National Book prize. Three other books were finalists for the Washington State Book Award: a book of art history, Mary Randlett Portraits (University of Washington Press, 2014); the poetry collection Timber Curtain (Chin Music Press, 2017);  and The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs (University of Washington Press, 2014), a book of essays about Richard Hugo and some of the Northwest towns that he wrote about. 

 

McCue has spent her career connecting literature to community life. She describes herself as an “arts instigator,” someone who starts up projects or reinvigorates them with creative vision. In 1996, with two friends, Linda Breneman and Andrea Lewis, she founded Richard Hugo House, a literary organization in Seattle, and she served as the founding director there for the organization’s first decade. McCue’s work at Hugo House included deep scholarship about Richard Hugo and the Northwest towns that inspired his poems. Her book The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs explores Richard Hugo’s “triggering town” process and his devotion to overlooked people and places. When the Hugo House building was torn down and replaced in 2017, McCue worked with a team to “Where the House Was,” a documentary film about the demolition and legacy of the place. Ryan Adams directed and Ian Lucero edited. The film includes collaborations with musicians Wayne Horovitz and Lori Goldston, and the sound was produced by Steve Fisk.  

McCue is also known as an award-winning professor at the University of Washington. In 2013, she won the Teaching Award for the Undergraduate Honors Program and in 2018 she won the UW Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest honor for teaching across the University’s three campuses. She is the founding editor of Pulley Press, a new poetry publishing imprint that aspires to find and publish poets writing out of rural American places.