Joan Houlihan is the author of four books: The Us (Tupelo Press, 2009), The Mending Worm (2006) winner of the Green Rose Award from New Issues Press, and Hand-held Executions: Poems & Essays. Her fourth, Ay, is forthcoming in 2013 from Tupelo Press.

Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review and in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (2005, University of Iowa Press) and The Book of Irish-American Poetry--Eighteenth Century to Present (2007, University of Notre Dame Press).

Houlihan has taught in Columbia University's MFA in Creative Writing Program in New York City, Emerson College's Writing & Publishing Program in Boston, Massachusetts, and is faculty mentor at Lesley University's Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is founder and director of two organizations: the Concord Poetry Center and the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference, both in Massachusetts.