Summary
Laura McCullough teaches poetry, essay, memoir, critical theory, and leads workshops on emotional literacy and trauma-informed education with a focus on support for educators in a complex culture.
Laura’s interests include education and how it is changing—how trauma affects individuals, families, and communities; how narrative shapes our lives and helps us metabolize our experiences and become more fully human. Her teaching and mentorship is trauma-informed and emotionally safe while being growth focused in terms of craft, as well as in terms of the lived life of the writer and the importance of meaning-making. She is also a bonsai enthusiast, loves music (and has sound bowls and hand-pans), has raised koi fish, is a chronic sourdough bread baker, and has a ton of kids.
Her books of poetry include Women & Other Hostages (Black Lawrence Press) and The Wild Night Dress (selected by Billy Collins in the Miller Williams Poetry Series, University of Arkansas Press), Jersey Mercy (Black Lawrence Press), Rigger Death & Hoist Another (Black Lawrence Press), Panic (winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award, Alice James Books), Speech Acts (Black Lawrence Press), What Men Want (XOXOX Press), and The Dancing Bear.
Her poems and prose have appeared in Best American Poetry (selected by Sherman Alexie), Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Harvard Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Pank, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and magazines.
Laura has had scholarships or fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Arts, and has been a Dodge Poetry Festival poet, a Florida Writers Circuit poet, and a Decatur Book Festival poet. She has been a finalist for the Brittingham and Felix Poetry Prize, the Isabella Gardner Award, and the Frost Place residency. She has been awarded three NJ State Arts Council Fellowships: two in poetry, one in prose.
In addition to her creative work, Laura is a scholar in her field and has edited two anthologies, A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry & Race (Georgia University Press) and The Room and the World: essays on Stephen Dunn (University of Syracuse Press).
Education
- B.A., Richard Stockton College of NJ
- MFA, Writing and Literature, Goddard College