Frances McCue
Frances McCue (born 1962) is an American poet, writer, and teacher. She has four poetry books and two books of prose. Her collection The Bled (2010) won the 2011 Washington State Book Award for poetry and the 2011 Grub Street National Book Prize. Other books — Mary Randlett Portraits (2014), The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs (2014), and Timber Curtain (2017) — were finalists for the Washington State Book Award.
In 1996 she co-founded Richard Hugo House in Seattle and served as its founding director for ten years. She studied Richard Hugo and the Northwest towns that inspired his poems. McCue teaches at the University of Washington and started Pulley Press, a poetry imprint.
She was born in North Tarrytown, New York, and grew up in Cincinnati and on Cape Cod after her parents split; the family later moved to Western Pennsylvania. She earned a BA from the University of New Hampshire, an MFA from the University of Washington, and studied at Columbia University with a Klingenstein Fellowship, earning EdM in 1996 and EdD in 2001.
Her work has appeared in Ms., The New York Times Book Review, The Stranger, The Seattle Times, and Tin House, among others, and in many anthologies. She won the Barnard New Women’s Poetry Prize for The Stenographer’s Breakfast and the Grub Street prize for The Bled, among other honors. A film she worked on, Where the House Was (about Hugo House and Seattle’s changes), came out in 2018 and inspired Timber Curtain (2017). In 2020 she published I Almost Read the Books Whole and launched Pulley Press.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 02:36 (CET).