Joan Houlihan is the author of six poetry collections, most recently It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest, winner of the 2021 Julia Ward Howe Award. Her previous collections include Shadow-feast, named a must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; The Mending Worm, winner of the New Issues Green Rose Award; The Us, named a must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; the sequel Ay; and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays.
Her poems have been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries; The Book of Irish American Poetry, 18th Century to Present; The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins; and The Eloquent Poem:128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making. She serves on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is the founding director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.
