Laura McCullough is an award-winning poet, essayist, editor, educator, and scholar whose work bridges literature, ethics, trauma studies, emotional intelligence, and often engages the sciences, whether that's botany, biology, or physics. She is the author of several poetry collections, including the forthcoming The Resurrection Jar (Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin), Women & Other Hostages (Black Lawrence Press), The Wild Night Dress (University of Arkansas Press), finalist in the Miller Williams Poetry Series, selected by Billy Collins, and Panic (Alice James Books), winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award, as well several other books: Rigger Death & Hoist Another, Jersey Mercy, Speech Acts, What Men Want, and The Dancing Bear, and a number of chapbooks.

McCullough is the editor of two acclaimed anthologies in her field: A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race (University of Georgia Press) and The Room and the World: Essays on Stephen Dunn (Syracuse University Press). Her hybrid memoir The Drummer of the Old Man and the Whale: on trauma, growth, and healing, explores her lifelong commitment to understanding the interconnections between narrative, embodiment, and resilience, and is the subject of her TedTalk of the same name (July 2025). She is working on another memoir, All the Love In Between: on boxing, grief, and the ways we go on. Additionally, she is working on a curricular book, Teaching Writing through Digital Literacy (forthcoming, Bloomsbury Press).

She has been recognized with three New Jersey State Arts Council Fellowships, scholarships to the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Nebraska Writers’ Conferences, and been awarded multiple artist residencies such as at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems, essays, and short fiction have been widely published, including in Best American Poetry, and she has been featured at the Dodge Poetry Festival, AWP, the Decatur Book Festival, and many others.

An engaging and intuitive speaker and teacher, McCullough has delivered keynote addresses at women’s conferences and literary festivals, and led workshops on poetry, memoir, literary theory, bonsai and writing in the garden, compassion and accountability, intergenerational differences, trauma-informed classrooms, and sustaining relationships in the age of anxiety. She works with individuals and groups in academic arenas and in private as both a writing mentor and a life coach. Her hybrid project Confessions of a Recovering Empath chronicles her research in the emerging field of emotional wellness, which infuses her teaching/mentoring pedagogy.

She has also served as co-chair of the Ethics Committee for Middle States accreditation and was an inaugural fellow at Brookdale’s Center for Transformational Learning. She holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from Goddard College, a BA from Stockton University, and is a Certified Public Manager with the State of New Jersey. She is currently completing a doctorate in Medical & Health Humanities at Drew University, researching intergenerational trauma, epigenetics, narrative theory, and the healing power of storytelling. Her dual dissertation includes scholarship on the confluence of science and the arts and an accompanying polyvocal novel on transnational, intergenerational women's issues, The Coordinates of Being.

Her professional training includes social-emotional and ethical curriculum development, trauma-informed pedagogies, relational life therapy, Polyvagal theory, emotionally focused therapy, and neuro-emotional release. With a lifelong commitment to care ethics, emotional intelligence, and nonviolent communication, she advocates for the role of the arts in fostering individual and communal health and resilience. She deeply believes in the power of connecting to nature and has a background in small-scale farming and animal husbandry. In a former phase of life, she worked for Rutgers Cooperative Extension in Community Food Security and community gardening and nutrition, and was part of the American Domestic Breed Conservancy, raising endangered breeds of sheep (especially Hog Island and Scottish Blackface sheep and Angora goats, and Jersey Black Giant chickens, and Khaki Campbell ducks, and spent a summer learning draft horse farming.