Marc Harshman

Marc Harshman holds degrees from Bethany College, Yale Divinity School, and the University of Pittsburgh. He has also received honorary doctorates from Bethany College and West Liberty University.

Harshman is the author of eight poetry collections, including Dispatch from the Mountain State (West Virginia University Press, 2025); Woman in a Red Anorak (Lynx House Press, 2018), winner of the publisher’s Annual Blue Lynx Prize; and Believe What You Can (Vandalia Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award from the Appalachian Studies Association. 

Harshman is also a children’s book author. His fourteenth children’s book, Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright's Masterpiece (Roaring Brook Press, 2017), was cowritten with Anna Egan Smucker. Harshman’s children’s books have been published in Danish, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Swedish. One of his books, Only One (Cobblehill Books, 1993), became a Reading Rainbow review title on PBS, and The Storm (Dutton Juvenile, 1995) was a Junior Library Guild selection, a Smithsonian Notable Book for Children, a Children’s Book Council Notable Book for Social Studies, and a 1995 Parent’s Choice Award recipient.

Harshman was the recipient of a West Virginia Arts Commission Fellowship in Poetry in 2000 and the fellowship in children’s literature in 2008. In 1994, he received the Ezra Jack Keats/Kerlan Memorial Fellowship from the University of Minnesota for research on Scandinavian myth and folklore. His monthly show for West Virginia Public Radio, The Poetry Break, began airing in January 2016.  

For many years, Harshman taught fifth and sixth grades at the Sand Hill School, one of the last of the three-room country schools. He was named the West Virginia State English Teacher of the Year by the West Virginia English Language Arts Council in 1995. Appointed in 2012, he is the seventh poet laureate of West Virginia. He lives in Wheeling.