Rachel McCrum
Rachel McCrum worked as a poet, performer, and promoter in Edinburgh from 2012 until 2017, arriving via Manchester, Belfast, New Zealand, Oxford, and Donaghadee. She was the Broad of Rally & Broad, organisers of cult Edinburgh-based poetry cabaret (#12 in The List’s ‘Hot 100 Scottish Cultural Icons 2015’), co-founder of Stewed Rhubarb Press, and one of the founding members of the SHIFT/ Collective, bringing spoken word solo shows from Scotland-based artists to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015.
McCrum’s first pamphlet, The Glassblower Dances, published by Stewed Rhubarb Press, was the winner of the 2012 Callum Macdonald Memorial Award. Do Not Alight Here Again, also Stewed Rhubarb, appeared in 2015 and formed the basis of her first solo show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Her debut collection, The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate, was published by the now-sadly-defunct Freight Books in 2017, and reissued by Stewed Rhubarb Press is 2018, while there is also a bilingual English-French edition available, as Le premier coup de clairon pour réveiller les femmes immorales, translated by Jonathan Lamy (Memoire d’encrier, 2017).
She has performed and taught workshops in poetry and performance in Greece, South Africa, Haiti, Canada, and throughout the UK. She was the inaugural BBC Scotland Poet-In-Residence in 2015, and both a recipient of a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and Writer-In-Residence for Coastword festival, Dunbar in 2016.
Currently McCrum lives in Montréal, Québec, where she continues to poet, perform, organise things, and teach poetry and performance. She is the editor of online magazine Font.
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Further Information
Poetry on Lockdown: ‘The Glassblower Dances’ by Rachel McCrum
From the Library Catalogue
Learn more
Commonwealth Poets United: Toni Stuart and Rachel McCrum
