Laura McCullough’s is a poet and prose writer whose essays, memoirs, stories, and poetry have appeared widely in places such as in The Georgia Review, The American Poetry Review, Guernica, Pank, Gulf Coast, The Writer's Chronicle, and others. Her recent books include Jersey Mercy (poems, forthcoming spring 2015, Black Lawrence Press), Rigger Death & Hoist Another (poems, BLP, 2013). Her previous books include Panic (poems, Alice James Books, 2011; winner of the Kinereth Genseler Award and a Foreword Book of the Year Finalist), Speech Acts (poems, BLP, 2010), and What Men Want (XOXOX Press, 2009), and The Dancing Bear (poems, Open Book Press, 2007). She has edited two anthologies, A Sense of Regard: essays on poetry and race (University of Georgia Press, 2015) and The Room and the World: essays on Stephen Dunn (University of Syracuse Press, 2014). Her poem, “There Were Only Dandelions” was selected by Sherman Alexi for Best American Poetry, 2015. She was selected as a writer for the 2014/15 Florida Writers Circuit tour and has read in the Dodge Poetry Festival, the Decatur Book Festival, and other events. She has had fellowships or scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, the NJ State Arts Council among others. She teaches full time at Brookdale Community College in NJ and is on the faculty of the Sierra Nevada low-res MFA and has taught for Ramapo College and Stockton University. She teaches for the Peter Murphy Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway. She is the founding editor of Mead: the Magazine of Literature and Libations. www.lauramccullough.org