of a first-person perspective in her work, a perspective missing from her previous full-length poetic work, Panic (2011): Many of the poems in Panic are emotionally true for me—living in post-911 New Jersey, raising teenage sons, having people in my life with health issues—but none of the poems were written in first person; I wasn’t complicit in any of them, and this began to seem emotionally dishonest.... In Rigger Death & Hoist Another, I tried to keep narrative rebar in the structures of my poems, but re-claim the authorial 'I' in creating the poems and the world view of the poems in relation to each other. McCullough's 2013 short novella Ripple & Snap borrows heavily on autobiographical themes, examining through the prism of fiction public suicide as a reprise to the self-inflicted death of her boyfriend when McCullough was a teenager. McCullough is working on a non-fiction memoir about the event, attempting "to find a way to tell it true." In March 2017, McCullough's seventh full-length book of poetry, The Wild Night Dress (University of Arkansas Press), was released. The University of Arkansas Press, which rewarded Laura publication for being a finalist for their 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, states:Laura McCullough finds passage through the darkest times as she loses, in short order, her mother and her marriage. Through her near unbearable grief, she creates poems that slip between science and nature as she grasps at coordinates in a world spun out of its orbit. From the God Particle to toroidal vortexes, from the slippery linguistics of translation to the translation of the body, McCullough brings readers to the mystery of surrender, and the paradox that what we bear can make us more beautiful, that there is a gift in grief. Awards McCullough was the Florida Writers' Circuit 2014/15 poet. She has been a finalist for the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the BOA Editions Isabella Gardner Award, and the Frost Place residency. In 2016, McCullough became a finalist for the University of Arkansas Press' Miller Williams Poetry Prize, selected by poet laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, Billy Collins. Editor Collins praised the collection, saying that, “This poet has the kind of binocular vision that can see the poetic and scientific aspects of the world simultaneously. . . . this shuffling together of lyrical/botanical and medical language is done so