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Laura McCullough is a veteran educator with twenty-five years of teaching experience. She focuses on incorporating trauma informed, emotionally literate "human skills" into her curriculum and into her workshops. Intra- and interpersonal skills are at the core of meaning-making and developing a sense of purpose in students. Whether she is teaching English, writing, research, critical theory, or creative writing--poetry, fiction, memoir--what’s underneath all of it is recognizing and respecting that people are always in the process of moving more fully into themselves. We use language to understand where we came from, who we are, and who we might become. Laura offers a variety of workshops for educators and individuals in a number of areas listed on her WORKSHOPS page.
Laura McCullough’s interests include education and how it is changing, how trauma with a Big T and a little t effects individuals, families, and communities, and how narrative shapes our lives and helps us metabolize our experiences and helps us 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 teaches poetry, essay, memoir, critical theory, and gives workshops on emotional literacy and trauma informed education with a focus on support for educators in a complex culture. Laura has an MFA in Literature and Writing from Goddard College. 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 (BLP), Rigger Death & Hoist Another (BLP), Panic (winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award, Alice James Books), Speech Acts (BLP), What Men Want (XOXOX Press), & The Dancing Bear. Her poems & 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, & many other journals and magazines. She 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, & has been a Dodge Poetry Festival poet, a Florida Writers Circuit poet, & 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 & 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). She is a full professor at Brookdale Community College, where she founded the Creative Writing Program & the Visiting Writers Series, has taught at Stockton University and Ramapo College, & is on the faculty of the Sierra Nevada College low-res MFA where she teaches poetry and critical theory. See SERVICES for more information about working with Laura. |
