Miriam Marston

Miriam Marston is a speaker, songwriter, and spiritual director based just outside of Portland, Oregon. From 2020-2026, Miriam served as the Director of Faith Formation at St. Anthony’s in Tigard. Prior to that, she served as the coordinator for the Institute for Catholic Life & Leadership at the Archdiocese of Portland (2015-2020). After receiving her MA in Pastoral Ministry from Boston College in 2010, she worked for the Theological Institute at St. John’s Seminary in Boston until 2013. Prior to her graduate studies, she lived and worked in Oxford, UK and then moved to Boston, where she worked in the canon law office for the Archdiocese of Boston. She studied history and religion at the College of William and Mary in Virginia (Class of '03).

She started composing at the age of ten, and called one of her first songs "Nostalgia." To this day, she can't remember what her ten-year old self could have been so nostalgic about. She released her first album Shades of an Eternal in 2000. In the years that followed, she kept up the writing, as she moved from Virginia to England to Boston to Oregon, even if it meant writing something on a mostly-broken piano in the basement of a university she wasn't enrolled in. In 2010, she released her second album, The Luggage of an Optimist, a collection of songs born out of the in-between moments of traveling through airports and train stations.

She has performed in a wide variety of venues, ranging from singing original songs in coffee houses (with a few people) to performing the National Anthem in a stadium (with 20,000 people). In 2004, she received an honorary award in "The Great American Song Contest" for her song "When I'm Wiser." 

In addition to the song-writing, Miriam published two books in 2015: What I Learned in Oxford and The Memory of Good. She is a contributing author to the 2019 OSV release, Road Signs for Catholic Teens. She offers workshops and presentations on a variety of topics pertaining to Christian life and culture. From 2020 - 2025, she hosted a weekly show on Mater Dei Radio, called Blazing the Trail.

Miriam is a consecrated virgin of the Archdiocese of Portland. When she's not writing or speaking, you'll most likely find her hanging out with family and friends, attempting a jog, watching a Marvel movie or enjoying a soccer match.

“Let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty on the “construction site” of our time.” - Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 16