Laura Mullen

Cross Genre
Murmur
“Wildly absorbing, Murmur is a gorgeous genre-bender: detective novel, film noir and memoir... ”
--Rikki Ducornet
Poetry
Subject
"Solid and brave and relentlessly inventive."
--Cal Bedient
The Surface
National Poetry Series selection
After I Was Dead
"Laura Mullen proceeds from near void into a powerful reconstruction of self…After I Was Dead is wildly versatile formally, restlessly roving from verse to prose to epistle and back."—Boston Review

Biography

Laura Mullen is a Professor at Louisiana State University. She is the author of three collections of poetry—The Surface, After I Was Dead, and Subject—and two hybrid texts, The Tales of Horror (Kelsey Street Press 1999), and Murmur (futurepoem books 2007). Prizes for her poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, and she has been awarded a Board of Regents ATLAS grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. She has had several MacDowell Fellowships and is a frequent visitor at the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Her poems have been widely anthologized and have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Octopus, 1913, Bomb, Hotel Amerika, the Corpse, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her work is included in American Hybrid, just out from Norton. Recent prose has been collected in Civil Disobediences: Poetics & Politics in Action, and in other anthologies, and the Denver Quarterly recently published her essay on the poetry of John Yau. Jason Eckardt’s setting of “The Distance (This)” (from Subject) premiered at the Miller Theater in New York and was performed at the Musica Nova festival in Helsinki. She was invited to participate in the Taipei International Poetry Festival in 2009.



Even now, 41 years later, if I think of him his name comes back (both his names) immediately and easily: gliding up from an opaque and then translucent depth, flashing to the surface like markers for a wreck or trap, like floats from a storm-torn net. So many other names I’ve lost, so many new names these days I just can’t seem to take in no matter how often they’re said (as if there’s a certain resistance)—there’s something more than a bit disturbing about the clarity of my memory for both of the names of a man I never think about or think I never think about.


Read the rest of the nonfiction essay in the August 2009 (memoir) issue of Ploughshares...