Joan Houlihan

Joan Houlihan is an American poet. She is the author of three books, most recently The Us (Tupelo Press, 2009), and The Mending Worm (New Issues Press), winner of the 2005 Green Rose Prize in Poetry. She has written a series of essays on contemporary American poetry called The Boston Comment, which drew a great deal of attention for their criticism of both traditional and avant garde poetry, occasioning responses from Fred Moramarco of Poetry International and wide range of letters from the poetry community both favorable and critical Houlihan is a staff reviewer for Contemporary Poetry Review.

Her work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry International, Fulcrum, Pleiades, Passages North, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Arts, VOLT, Poetry and the Boston Review.

The Mending Worm has been described by Lucie Brock-Broido as “a book of stunning accomplishment" and by Frederick Marchant as one that "gives us poems that in their art and authenticity render whole that which has been shattered." Ellen Wehle, poetry editor of AGNI magazine and poetry reviewer, states: "Writers are told 'make it fresh, make it new.' In The Mending Worm it's all new. Houlihan wields language like a weapon, carving out lines that are stingingly precise.”

Houlihan was born and raised in Massachusetts and received her BA and MA from University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She is founder of the Concord Poetry Center in Concord, Massachusetts and of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference. She is also on the faculty of Lesley University’s low-residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing program.