Laura McCullough is an award-winning poet, author, essayist, educator, and speaker whose work explores the stories we inherit, the emotions we carry, and the relational skills we need to live more fully with ourselves and one another. Drawing from literature, medical and health humanities, trauma studies, care ethics, and the sciences, she writes and speaks about emotional literacy, narrative identity, intergenerational experience, self-regulation and co-regulation, and what it means to remain deeply human in an increasingly dysregulated and technologically mediated world.
McCullough holds a Doctorate in Medical and Health Humanities from Drew University and an MFA in Writing and Literature from Goddard College. She is a professor of English at Brookdale Community College and an adjunct professor at Monmouth University, where her teaching includes writing, literature, creative practice, digital literacy, and reflective learning. Her forthcoming educator book, Teaching Writing: Digital Literacy in the Information Age—Keeping the Learner in the Loop (Bloomsbury, 2027), offers practical and humane approaches to teaching attention, discernment, ethical participation, and complex thinking in the age of artificial intelligence.
She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including The Resurrection Jar (forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2027), Women & Other Hostages, The Wild Night Dress, Jersey Mercy, Rigger Death & Hoist Another, and Panic, winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award. Her work has appeared widely, including in Best American Poetry. She is also the editor of A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race and The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn. McCullough has received three New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships, as well as residencies, scholarships, and honors from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and other literary organizations.
Her 2025 TED Talk, “The Drummer, the Old Man, and the Whale,” considers trauma, post-traumatic growth, meaning-making, and the transformative possibilities of attention and story. She has presented at literary, educational, and public events including the Dodge Poetry Festival, AWP, and the Decatur Book Festival, and she develops talks and workshops for educators, writers, caregivers, organizations, and communities seeking more humane ways to understand emotion, relationship, conflict, resilience, and change.
McCullough is currently at work on Confessions of a Recovering Empath, a hybrid work of narrative nonfiction that brings personal story into conversation with research on empathy, attachment, trauma, boundaries, emotional contagion, and relational health. Across her speaking, teaching, writing, Substack essays, and short-form videos, she returns to two guiding ideas: trauma needs story in order to metabolize, and we need to teach—and practice—the technologies of the heart.