Joan Houlihan


Joan Houlihan is an American poet. She is the author of six books, most recently It Isn't a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest, winner of the 2021 Julia Ward Howe Award. Her other books are Shadow-feast, described by the Los Angeles Review as "...a tour de force sheared of excess, breathtaking in its leaps, and thrilling in its sonic resonances"; The Us described by Lucie Brock-Broido as: "...like nothing I have ever read or seen...wildly hewn, classically construed and skewed by an imagined lexicon....both syntactically inventive and radically simple"; Ay, the sequel to The Us, described by Ilya Kaminsky as "breathtakingly inventive and yet deeply humane...a narrative and song at once; it is talismanic"; The Mending Worm, winner of the 2005 Green Rose Prize in Poetry, and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays which includes her series of essays on contemporary American poetry called The Boston Comment. The essays drew a great deal of attention for their criticism of both traditional and what she termed "post-avant" poetry, occasioning responses from Fred Moramarco of Poetry International and a wide range of letters from the poetry community both favorable and critical.

Biography

Houlihan was born and raised in Newton, Massachusetts and received her BA and MA from University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has taught at Columbia University, Smith College, and Emerson College and she is Professor of Practice in Poetry at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is also on the faculty of Lesley University's low-residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing program.
Her work has appeared widely in many journals and magazines, among them Boston Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Arts, Fulcrum, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Poetry International, Poetry, VOLT, and has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, The Book of Irish-American Poetry–Eighteenth Century to Present, and The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins.
She is founder of the Concord Poetry Center in Concord, Massachusetts and of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.

Published works

Full-Length Poetry Collections
  • It Isn't a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest
  • Shadow-feast
  • Ay The Us The Mending Worm
Multi-Genre CollectionsHand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays

Anthologies

The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making
  • The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins
  • The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries
  • ''An Anthology of Irish-American Poetry, 18th Century to Present''