Rachel McCrum is a poet, performer, editor, and curator who spends her time between Montreal/Tio’tiake and Cacouna in Bas-Saint-Laurent. Originally from Northern Ireland, she lived in Edinburgh, Scotland between 2010 and 2016, where she was the first BBC Scotland Poet in Residence and recipient of a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. Her debut collection, The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate, translated by Jonathan Lamy and published in a bilingual edition with Mémoire d’encrier in fall 2020, was a finalist for Le Prix de traduction de la Fondation Cole 2022 from the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her new spoken word show, La belle-mère / The Stepmother, co-written and co-performed with Amélie Prévost, is touring Quebec and Canada in 2025 and 2026 and is available in a bilingual edition from L’Hexagone. Rachel was a finalist for the 2025 Ian Ferrier Spoken Word Prize from QWF. She works part-time as Cultural Coordinator for Heritage Lower St Lawrence and is the vocalist for noise-poetry group Pigs&Wolves.