Catherine Ann Cullen is an award-winning poet, children’s writer and songwriter who was born in Drogheda, County Louth. She is an Irish Research Council EP Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin and Poetry Ireland from September 2022 for two years, researching the lost street poets and tenement balladeers of 19th-century Dublin. She was the inaugural Poet in Residence at Poetry Ireland from October 2019 to December 2021 with ongoing duties until May 2023 when Anne Tannam was appointed to the role. A video on the legacy of the residency is here.

Cullen is a recipient of the prestigious Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship 2018/19. Her many honours include the nationwide Business to Arts Award for Best Use of Creativity in the Community for her Poetry Ireland residency in 2022, and the same award for her residency in St Joseph’s School, East Wall in 2017; the Celebrating Women With Words award 2022 (Cercle Littéraire Irlandais), with 2nd Prize in 2023; the shortlist of four for Irish Poem of the Year 2020; joint first in the Joyce-Cycle Competition 2019; best song in the Camac Poetry and Songwriting Competition 2018, and the Francis Ledwidge Poetry Award in 2016 and in 2009. Cullen was awarded an Arts Council Bursary 2017/18 and an Irish Writers Centre/Cill Rialaig Bursary 2018.

From Sept 2016 to June 2019 she was A&L Goodbody Writer in Residence in East Wall, and from 2012-2022, resident writer on the Bookmarks project with Trinity College Dublin Access Programmes (TAP). 

Her latest book, The Song of Brigid’s Cloak, a retelling in rhyme of a beloved Irish legend, was published by Beehive Books in October 2022. The book, gorgeously illustrated by Katya Swan with a palette inspired by the Irish landscape, started life as a song written by Cullen for a traditional-style song project, and the words and music are included at the back of the book with a link to a youTube video where children can learn the song.

The book follows All Better!, a collection of poems for children on illness and recovery, reimagined from the Latvian of Inese Landere and published in February 2019 by Little Island. Two previous children’s books, Thirsty Baby (2003) and the gold-award-winning The Magical, Mystical, Marvelous Coat (2001), were published by Little, Brown (US).

One of her projects for the Poetry Ireland residency was a history of the PI headquarters at 11 Parnell Square in 11 poems of 11 lines, syllables or words: 11 x 11 for Number 11: Poems for Poetry Ireland (2023). The broadsheet, illustrated by John Dorman, is available for purchase for €5+postage with all proceeds to Gaza charities (donate button coming shortly, but you can donate here and contact here for a broadsheet.) She has also written three poetry collections, The Other Now: New and Selected Poems (Dedalus Press 2016), Strange Familiar (Doghouse 2013) and A Bone in My Throat (Doghouse 2007). 

Cullen’s poems, songs, journal articles and radio essays have been widely anthologised and broadcast. She has worked as a writer in residence, workshop facilitator and visiting author in pre-schools to third level colleges and in outreach education with prisoners, women’s groups, third age groups and many others in Ireland and elsewhere. Her poems are part of the Ireland Poetry Reading Archive at UCD. She was previously a library assistant, an RTÉ Radio producer, and a lecturer in journalism. Her collaborations have included Street Songs and Sea Shanties for the 21st Century with Imogen Gunner in schools in Dublin’s Docklands and Dance Till Dán, a poetry and dance film with choreographer Mia Chiaro, film maker Laura Fitzsimons and Fatima Groups which won the Creative Lives Ireland Award 2023.

You can listen to “A City Out of Old Songs”, a tour of Dublin in her poems and songs presented at Pearse Street Library here