Joan Houlihan’s most recent book of poetry, The Us, was named a 2009 "must read" by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her earlier books are The Mending Worm, winner of the Green Rose Award from New Issues Press, and Hand-Held Executions: Poems and Essays. A fourth collection, Ay, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2013. Her work has appeared in  Boston Review, Poetry, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review and Gettysburg Review, and anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries and The Book of Irish-American Poetry--Eighteenth Century to Present (University of Notre Dame Press). She is contributing editor for the Contemporary Poetry Review and author of critical essays on contemporary American poetry online at bostoncomment.com. Founder and Director of the Concord Poetry Center and the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference, Houlihan is on the faculty of Lesley University's Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

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