Rachael Marie Walker
creative and professional writer & educator
about me
Rachael Marie Walker is a Seattle writer from the weeds of Virginia. They’ve called Washington, DC, several corners of Virginia, and Paris home, but they’re happiest in the Pacific Northwest.
They graduated summa cum laude from Hollins University in 2018 and graduated with an MFA in prose creative writing from the University of Washington - Seattle in 2024.
They enjoy writing about bodies, queerness, place, families, and formal/structural experiementation.
When not reading or writing, they enjoy bicycling around the Puget Sound and Lake Washington, baking bread and cupcakes, rollerskating, rock climbing, wandering thrift stores in Capitol Hill, and watching trashy reality TV with their cat, Honeybee.
Follow them on Twitter if you like your writing tweets interspersed with thoughts about 2014 Tumblr Culture and gaylor conspiracy theories.
creative writing publications
2016: de-presh-uhn. Poem. Two Cites Review.
2020: A Small Seed of Fate Carried Inside Me. Nonfiction. Emerald City Literary Magazine.
2021: There is a Bird in Me and I am Her Cage. Nonfiction. Bone & Ink Literary Magazine [defunct]
2021: Tumble Dry Low. Flash. Off Menu Press.
2023: Grateful to Be Here. Fiction. Pithead Chapel.
2023: [de]crescendo. Fiction. Foglifter 8.2.
2023: Revelation 21:4. Fiction. Still: The Journal. *Nominated for Pushcart Prize
2023: I Do Crew. Fiction. The Coachella Review.
2024: My Eating Disorder Competes on America’s Next Top Model. Flash fiction. Five South.
2024: AM I A LESBIAN? Nonfiction. Electric Literature.
2024: Dispossessed. Fiction. X-R-A-Y Literary Journal.
Upcoming: ABECEDARIAN OF ANOREXIA. Nonfiction. Grist.
awards
Winner of the Bill Hallberg Award in Creative Nonfiction for essay “A Small Seed of Fate Carried Inside Me” (2018)
Runner-up for Anne Hook Rice Prize for Creative Nonfiction (2018) for an excerpt of longer nonfiction work, “There is a Bird in Me and I am Her Cage”
Winner of the Grace Milliman Pollack Award for Creative Writing for nonfiction piece “Diagnosis, a Story in Fragments” and fiction piece “Grateful to Be Here” (2023).
classes taught
My teaching portfolio can be found here. This is a PDF on Google Drive. This includes teaching philosophy, examples of student work, lesson plans, and assessments of my performance.
University of Washington: ENGL 131, Rhetoric and Composition
University of Washington: ENGL 284, Short Fiction Creative Writing