A MacDowell and Karolyi Foundation Fellow, a featured poet at the International Poetry Festival in Taipei, a Rona Jaffe Award recipient and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Mullen holds degrees from the University of Iowa and U.C. Berkeley. Her poetry has been anthologized in collections from Norton, Wesleyan, and elsewhere; recent work has appeared in the Harvard Review, Court Green, the Bennington Review, Diagram, and the Georgia Review. Mullen’s first book, The Surface, was a National Poetry Series selection, and her subsequent poetry collections and hybrid-genre works have been published by the University of California Press, FuturePoem, and Otis / Seismicity, among other presses. A CD of Jason Eckardt's setting of her poem "The Distance (This)" is available from Mode records. Her collaboration with composer Nathan Davis—"a Sound uttered, a Silence crossed"—had its premiere in La Jolla, and has been performed at Notre Dame and Williams College. A collaboration (Verge) with John David O'Brien was published in 2017, and her translation of Veronique Pittolo's Hero was published by Black Square Editions in 2019. Solid Objects published her ninth collection, EtC, in fall 2023.