Cathy Hailey

At Johns Hopkins, Cathy Hailey is a lecturer for the MA in Teaching Writing program.

Hailey taught English and creative writing in Virginia’s Prince William County Schools for forty years, much of that time as part of the Center for the Fine and Performing Arts Creative Writing Concentration. She sponsored the award-winning Eddas literary/art magazine for 33 years, and her students earned four Virginia High School League Savedge Awards for sustained excellence. Hailey taught magazine publication and creative writing classes at VHSL workshops and was a judge for their contests.

As an adjunct and as part of the dual enrollment program, she taught English Composition courses for Northern Virginia Community College. She has been a teacher-consultant for the Northern Virginia Writing Project since 1981 and became a co-director focused on student programming, specifically planning and facilitating the Student Summer Institute and Saturday Young Writers Workshops.

In 2010, she won the Mark Farrington Personal Writing Award, which afforded her the opportunity to attend the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival; she has attended ever since. In 2014, she was selected by Prince William Living as one of Prince William County’s Influential Women, and in 2016 was nominated for a Kathleen K. Seefeldt Award for Art Excellence in the category of Outstanding Arts Educator.

Since retiring from full-time teaching, in addition to teaching at Johns Hopkins, Hailey has participated in the PWCS Retirement Opportunity Program to support student writing initiatives. Hailey is a poet who coordinates the Poetry-in-the-Schools initiative and assists in northern region programming for the Poetry Society of Virginia. As a member of the Poet Laureate Circle, she co-coordinates In the Company of Laureates, a biennial reading of poets laureate held in Prince William County.

Her writing has been published in the 2016 Poetry Virginia Review, The Journal of the Virginia Writing Project, What Peaches & What Penumbras: An Anthology of Grocery Lists, and in the Springtime in Winter and Peace and Identity anthologies, among other publications.

Hailey graduated from Duke University with an Artium Baccalaureus in English and earned a Master of Arts in English, with a concentration in professional writing and editing, from George Mason University.

Featured Works

• I Would Rather Be a Hyacinth, Cathy Hailey, Finishing Line Press, 2023
• “Birdscape,” Cathy Hailey, WWPHWrites, Washington Writers Publishing House, August 27, 2023
• “River of Grief,” Cathy Hailey, Texas Poetry Assignment, July 2, 2023
• “Bucha Massacre,” Cathy Hailey, The New Verse News, April 4, 2022
• “500,000,” Cathy Hailey, The New Verse News, February 25, 2021