About
Marcia LeBeau’s first full-length poetry collection, A CURIOUS HUNGER, will be published by Broadstone Books in 2024. Her poems, essays and reviews appear in O, The Oprah Magazine, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Painted Bride Quarterly, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. She was a third-place co-winner of the 2023 Allen Ginsberg Award, was longlisted for the 2022 Ralph Angel Prize, and received an honorable mention for the Rattle Poetry Prize. Her work has also received several Pushcart Prize nominations. She has an MFA in poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the founding director of The Write Space, a co-working and event space for creative writers in The Valley Arts District of Orange, New Jersey.
Marcia is a New Jersey poet by way of Brooklyn by way of Pennsylvania. She stumbled into poetry by accident when she wrote a radio ad for Courvoisier Cognac, which was deemed spoken word poetry. From there she took her words to the stage performing most notably at the Sugar Shack in Harlem and other venues throughout New York City. In 2010, she was runner-up in the Bowery Poetry Club’s One Club Poetry Slam, after which Bob Holman nicknamed her “Lady Zoyzia.”
Poetry led her to the classroom in Washington Heights to teach for New York Scores where she taught fifth-grade girls in an after-school literacy program that combined poetry and soccer. For her work with New York Scores, she received the Most Outstanding Writing Coach Award. She also trained with Urban Word in poetry pedagogy.
She lives in South Orange, New Jersey with her family and is currently at work on a book of erotic love poems dedicated to her husband, and a mixed-genre book.