Cáit O’Neill McCullagh

Cáit O’Neill McCullagh is a published poet and essayist, and an experienced educator in community and Higher Education settings. She has worked throughout the Highlands and Islands as a public ethnologist and archaeologist. Originating from Kerry, in south west Ireland, and a childhood in London, Cáit, has lived in the Highlands since she was a teenager. At her home in Easter Ross, she is completing a PhD thesis with Heriot-Watt University that is based on an extended period of ‘creative ethnology’ conducted while working and living in island communities across Orkney and Shetland. This work is concerned with her commitment to exploring and sharing how so-named fragile communities are resourced by their local and connective knowledges: sharing, renovating, and renewing traditions for assembling more possible futures. Her pamphlet of poems ‘The songs I sing are sisters’, co-authored with Sligo poet, Sinéad McClure, was co-winner of Dreich’s ‘Classic Chapbooks’ 2022. Currently, she is working on her first solo, full-length collection of poems, to be published by Drunk Muse Press in early 2024, and is surviving a diagnosis of cancer, identified in the spring of 2022.