Laura Mullen

Poet Laura Mullen was born in Los Angeles in 1958. She earned her BA at the University of California-Berkeley and MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her collections of poetry include Enduring Freedom (2012), Dark Archive (2011), Murmur (2007), Subject (2005), After I Was Dead (1999), The Tales of Horror (1999), and The Surface (1991), which was a National Poetry Series selection. Known for writing book-length and hybrid texts, Mullen’s work has been praised for its wild invention and play. Her poems are included in anthologies such as American Hybrid (2009), The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (2012), and I’ll Drown my Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (2012), among others. The composer Jason Eckardt’s setting of her poem “The Distance (This)” was released as Undersong by Mode records in 2011.
 
Mullen’s many honors and awards include foundations from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. She is the recipient of the Ironwood’s Stanford Prize and a Creative Writing special interest delegate for the Modern Language Association. Mullen teaches in the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets at Naropa and is the Kenan Chair in the Humanities at Wake Forest University.