Joan Houlihan is founding director of the Concord Poetry Center and of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conferences. She is author of four books: Hand-Held Executions, Poems & Essays (2003); The Mending Worm (New Issues Press, 2006), The Us (Tupelo Press, 2009) and Ay (Tupelo Press,2014). She has written a series of critical essays on contemporary American poetry, called The Boston Comment, and her work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Harvard Review, and anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press) and in The Book of Irish-American Poetry--Eighteenth Century to Present (University of Notre Dame Press). Houlihan is a staff reviewer for the Contemporary Poetry Review. She is on the poetry faculty of Lesley University's Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts.