Joan Houlihan is founder of the Concord Poetry Center in Concord, Massachusetts and author of two books: Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays (ISBN 0615123112) and The Mending Worm (ISBN 1930974590), winner of the 2005 Green Rose Award from New Issues Press. She has written a series of essays on contemporary American poetry called The Boston Comment and is staff reviewer for the Contemporary Poetry Review. She is editor-in-chief of the online poetry magazine Perihelion.
Her work has appeared in many journals and magazines and has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press, 2005) and An Anthology of Irish-American Poetry, 18th Century to Present (University of Notre Dame, 2006).
Ellen Wehle, poetry editor, AGNI, 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.” [1] West Branch, Spring/Summer, 2006