Summary
Laura McCullough is a poet, writer, educator, speaker and scholar whose work spans poetry, memoir, hybrid creative nonfiction and literary criticism. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Wild Night Dress, Jersey Mercy, Women & Other Hostages and the forthcoming The Resurrection Jar, as well as the editor of two essay collections. Her work has appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, and she has received three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. In addition to her literary work, she has presented a TED Talk on post-traumatic growth, exploring the ways story, compassion and human connection can help us reconstruct meaning after profound loss. She teaches poetry, memoir and hybrid creative nonfiction, with a particular interest in helping writers discover forms that allow lived experience, research, memory and inquiry to speak to one another.
McCullough holds a doctorate in Medical and Health Humanities, where her scholarship focused on narrative theory, trauma theory and intergenerational familial trauma. Her work explores the ways stories shape what we understand about ourselves and others - and how experiences carried within families and across generations can be investigated, reimagined and given language through writing. Central to her teaching is the belief that research and lived experience need not occupy separate worlds: memoir and creative nonfiction can bring personal narrative into conversation with history, psychology, neuroscience and cultural inquiry. She encourages writers to use storytelling not simply to recount experience but to deepen it through curiosity, reflection and research, recognizing narrative as a powerful tool for discovery, transformation and healing.
Education
- DMH, Medical & Health Humanities, Drew University
- MFA, Writing and Literature, Goddard College
- B.A., Richard Stockton College of NJ