Karen McCarthy Woolf (born 1966)^[1][2] is a poet of English and Jamaican parentage.^[3]

Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to English and Jamaican parents.^[1] Her father emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1957 as a part of the Windrush generation, and her experience and identity as a mixed-race woman has informed her poetry.^[2]

She has a PhD (2018) from Royal Holloway, University of London: her thesis title was At the centre of the edge : contemporary ecological poetry and the sacred hybrid, and it focussed on the work of Louise Glück, Kei Miller and Joy Harjo^[4][5]

McCarthy Woolf was mentored on The Complete Works poets of colour mentoring scheme initiated by Bernardine Evaristo to redress representational invisibility.^[6]

McCarthy Woolf's 2014 book An Aviary of Small Birds was shortlisted for the 2015 Best First Collection award of the Forward Prizes for Poetry^[7] and the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize,^[8] and chosen as an Observer poetry book of the month.^[9]

The poem "Outside" from her Seasonal Disturbances was chosen by Carol Rumens as "Poem of the Week" in The Guardian in December 2017.^[10]

In 2019, McCarthy Woolf was appointed Poet in Residence at University of California, Los Angeles.^[11] She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.^[1][12]

McCarthy Woolf won second place in the 2020 Laurel Prize for her collection Seasonal Disturbances.^[13]

In 2021 she was one of the judges of the 2020 National Poetry Competition.^[14][15]