Joan Houlihan is an American poet. She is the author of six books, most recently It Isn't a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest (Four Way Books), winner of the 2021 Julia Ward Howe Award. Her other books are Shadow-feast (Four Way Books, 2018), described by the Los Angeles Review as "...a tour de force sheared of excess, breathtaking in its leaps, and thrilling in its sonic resonances"; The Us (Tupelo Press, 2009) described by Lucie Brock-Broido as: "...like nothing I have ever read or seen...wildly hewn, classically construed and skewed by an imagined lexicon....both syntactically inventive and radically simple"; Ay (Tupelo Press, 2014), the sequel to The Us, described by Ilya Kaminsky as "breathtakingly inventive and yet deeply humane...a narrative and song at once; it is talismanic"; The Mending Worm (New Issues Press), winner of the 2005 Green Rose Prize in Poetry, and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays (Del Sol Press, 2003; Room 204 Press, 2009) which includes her series of essays on contemporary American poetry called The Boston Comment. The essays drew a great deal of attention for their criticism of both traditional and what she termed "post-avant" poetry, occasioning responses from Fred Moramarco of Poetry International[1] and a wide range of letters from the poetry community both favorable and critical[2]