Film Critic and Former Film Instructor at Cabrillo College

Morton Marcus is an award-winning writer, film historian and film critic. He taught English and Film at Cabrillo College for thirty years, and his sixteen-part television history of film, Movie Milestones, has been shown on many cable television stations and for years was the main visual source of film history at the AFTRS, the Australian national film school. Marcus has been a longtime co-host of KUSP radio’s “The Poetry Show” and was the co-host of the film review television program “Cinema Scene” which was a regular offering on AT &T Broadband and Comcast networks from 1999-2003, and now continues on the Community Television channel of Santa Cruz County. He also leads a film discussion group at Santa Cruz’s Nickelodeon theater on the first and third Saturday of every month. He is the president of the Pacific Rim Film Festival and has curated film series at various museums as well as taken part in several panels on literature and film at the John Steinbeck Center.

As poet and novelist, Marcus was the 1999 Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year. He has published nine volumes of poetry and one novel, including The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems, Pages From A Scrapbook of Immigrants (Coffee House), When People Could Fly (Hanging Loose), and most recently Moments Without Names: New & Selected Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2002) and Shouting Down The Silence: Verse Poems 1988-2001 (Creative Arts Books, 2002). Marcus has published more than 400 poems in literary journals, and his work can be found in poetry anthologies in the United States, Europe and Australia.

In 2003, his work appeared in two important anthologies, Poets Against The War and No Boundaries: Prose Poems By 24 American Poets. Those publications marked the 79th and 80th anthologies in which his poetry has been published. This year, his poems appeared in the Henry Holt anthology Revenge & Forgiveness, and for the 6th time on Poetry Daily intrernational website. Other new work is scheduled to be published in The Denver Quarterly, Hanging Loose, Luna, Sentence and Caesura. The latter magazine featured him in its Fall 2003 issue, and will carry an interview of him conducted by Robert Sward in its 25th anniversary issue to be brought our later this year. Morton’s autobiography is one of the featured items in Volume 218 of Gale’s Contemporary Authors series.

Marcus has also read and taught workshops in dozens of colleges throughout the country, including several campuses of The University of California and State Universities of New York, Notre Dame, Lewis & Clark (Oregon), and Columbia. In 1999, he was named Santa Cruz County Artist of The Year. The March/April 2001 issue of The Bloomsbury Review carried a long interview with him, and the 2002 issue of Red Wheelbarrow featured his work and another long interview.