Joyelle McSweeney
Department Chair
William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English
Areas of study
- Creative Writing
- Environmental
- Postcolonial/Global
Education
MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry, Iowa Writers Workshop, 2001
M.Phil. in English Studies, University of Oxford, 1999
B.A. in English and American Literature, Harvard University, 1997
Research and teaching interests
Creative writing, poetry, poetics, translation, sound, performance, literary form, dramatic form, genre, prophecy, decadence, ecopoetics
Biography
A winner of the 2026 Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten award-winning books spanning poetry, prose, drama, translation, and criticism. Her most recent book, Death Styles (2024), is a record of writing oneself back to life after grievous loss and was awarded the 2026 Indiana Book Award. Her debut volume The Red Bird (2001) was selected by Allen Grossman to inaugurate the Fence Modern Poets Series; her verse play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks (2012) inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Playwrights and was recently re-released in digital archive edition by CUNY. McSweeney's poetry collection, Toxicon and Arachne (2020), called a "frightening and brilliant book" by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker, was featured in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, MS., the Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. Her influential essay collection The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014) proposes a decadent ecopoetics and reads modern and contemporary literature in light of ecological phenomenon such as mutation, extinction and decay. McSweeney is a co-translator of the award-winning Yi Sang, Selected Works (2020).
With Johannes Göransson, she is a co-founder of the international press Action Books, which has built US readerships for poets from Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and elsewhere while advocating for translators and the act of translation itself. In 2022, McSweeney was recognized with the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, honoring exceptional accomplishment in any genre, as well as with the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America.
McSweeney is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and has twice been awarded The Rev. Edmund P. Joyce C.S.C. Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. In 2026, she was named to the 2026 Notre Dame All-Faculty Team.
Representative publications
Death Styles. New York: Nightboat Books. 2024.
Toxicon and Arachne. New York: Nightboat Books. 2020.
The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry Series. 2015.
Dead Youth, or, The Leaks. New York: Litmus Press. 2014.
Salamandrine, 8 Gothics. Vermont: Tarpaulin Sky Press. 2013.
Percussion Grenade. Albany: Fence Books. 2012.
