Laura Mullen is a Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Louisiana State University. She is the author of four collections of poetry—The Surface, After I Was Dead, Subject, and Dark Archive (University of California Press, 2011)—as well as two hybrid texts, The Tales of Horror, and Murmur. Recognitions 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 work has been widely anthologized and is included in American Hybrid (Norton). Recent prose has been collected in Civil Disobediences: Poetics & Politics in Action, and published in Ploughshares and The Fairytale Review. The composer Jason Eckardt’s setting of The Distance (This) from Subject premiered in New York and Helsinki and is July, 2011 release for Mode Records. New work is out or forthcoming in Action Yes!, Cerise Press, Ghost Town, the Denver Quarterly,Viz Arts, and New American Writing. Mullen was invited to participate in the Taipei International Poetry Festival in 2009 and she is the special interest delegate in Creative Writing for the Modern Language Association for 2012-2014.