[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 focused 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.
[10] In 2019, McCarthy Woolf was a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar and appointed as poet-in-residence at University of California, Los Angeles.
[17] McCarthy Woolf was nominated for the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, alongside Raymond Antrobus, Carl Phillips, Gboyega Odubanjo, Rachel Mann and others.