Morton Marcus was the l999 Santa Cruz County Artist of The Year and received the Gail Rich Award in 2007 for his cultural contributions to Santa Cruz County. He has published ten volumes of poetry and one novel, including The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems, Pages From A Scrapbook of Immigrants, and When People Could Fly.

Morton has had more than 450 poems in literary journals, and his work has been selected to appear in over 85 anthologies in the United States, Europe and Australia. In 2002 he published his eighth and ninth books of poetry: Moments Without Names: New & Selected Prose Poems (White Pine Press) and Shouting Down The Silence: Verse Poems 1988-2001 (Creative Arts Books). In 2007, he published a new volume of prose poems, Pursuing The Dream Bone.

His latest book, Striking Through The Masks: A LIterary Memoir (Capitola Book Company) tells the story of Marcus' growth from embattled youth to uneasy adulthood, conjuring up the last half of the twentieth century and the opening decade of the new millennium, while recounting his own struggle to find self-awareness and wisdom.

Morton's trilogy of interviews on the craft of poetry appeared in the March/April 2001 issue of The Bloomsbury Review, the 2002 issue of Red Wheelbarrow and in the 25th anniversary issue of Caesura (2004).

Morton has read his poetry and conducted poetry workshops in dozens of universities throughout the country, among them Columbia University, Notre Dame, The University of Oregon, and several University of California campuses. He has also been poet-in-residence at several State University of New York campuses, The University of Arkansas' Graduate Writing Program, and Providence College.

Morton taught English and Film at Cabrillo College for thirty years, until his retirement in l998. His sixteen-part televison history of film, Movie Milestones, has been shown on many cable television stations, and was for years the main visual source of film history at the AFTRS, the Australian national film school. He has been a longtime co-host of KUSP radio's The Poetry Show and is the co-host of the film review television show Cinema Scene shown in the San Francisco Bay Area. He also leads a film discussion group at Santa Cruz's Nickelodeon theater on the first and third Saturday of every month. He has curated film series at various museums and has taken part in several panels on literature and film at the John Steinbeck Center.