Rachael Marie Walker
writer & educator
about me
Rachael Marie Walker is a Seattle writer from the weeds of Virginia.
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, trauma and recovery, coming of age, mental illness and recovery, place, families, and formal/structural experimentation. They’re currently working on a few different projects combining visual art with nonfiction narrative and a few novel drafts, as well as short fiction, essays, and the occasional poem while the longer projects are cooking.
They’re a voracious reader in all genres with a preference for the same kinds of things they like to write: weird nonfiction, literary fiction about complicated romantic relationships with intimacy issues and queerness, metanarratives, autofiction, and the odd queer romance or horror novel.
When not reading or writing, you can find them on a long bike ride, chatting to someone about music history, or watching reality TV with their cat, Honeybee.
Find them on Instagram, where they post about writing, reading, recovery, and daily nonsense.
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.
2025: Proceso de Eliminación. Nonfiction. New Delta Review
2025: ABECEDARIAN OF ANOREXIA. Nonfiction. Grist Issue 17.
Upcoming Winter 2026: the body is eternal | or entirely obliterated. Poetry. Puerto del Sol.
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).