Paul Cunningham

Biography

Paul Cunningham is the Creative Writing Program Manager at the University of Notre Dame, where he also co-manages Action Books, an international poetry and translation press. He is the recipient of the 2021 Diann Blakely Poetry Prize and the 2015 Sparks Prize Fellowship. He is the author of Brillo (Lavender Ink, 2025), Sociocide at the 24/7 (DIAGRAM / New Michigan Press, 2025), Fall Garment (Schism Press, 2022) and The House of the Tree of Sores (Schism Press, 2020). He is also one of the collaborators in Katrine Øgaard Jensen's Ancient Algorithms (Sarabande Books, 2025). From the Swedish, he is the translator of Helena Österlund’s Words (OOMPH! Press, 2019). He has also translated two chapbooks by Sara Tuss Efrik: Automanias: Selected Poems (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2016) and The Night’s Belly (Toad Press, 2016). His most recent poetry chapbook is The Inmost (Carrion Bloom Books, 2020). His interests include literary translation in theory and practice, decadent poetics, and ecocritical studies. He is also a board member of NonfictioNOW and a coordinator of the International Network of Comparative Humanities (INCH), funded by Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame. 

Cunningham’s writing has appeared in Poem-a-Day, BOMB Magazine, Amsterdam Review, Denver Quarterly, The Texas Review, The Fourth River, Bat City Review, Quarterly West, OmniVerse, Yalobusha Review, DIAGRAM, Spork, LIT: The Journal of The New School, Tarpaulin Sky, and many others. His book reviews have appeared in Transmotion: An Online Journal of Indigenous Studies, Harvard Review, Heavy Feather Review, Kenyon Review, Fanzine, and DIAGRAM. His writing and translations have appeared in the following anthologies: American Pop Culture Almanac 1776-2026: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose (Moon Tide Press, 2026); Experimental Writing: A Guidebook and Anthology (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024); A Flame Called Indiana: An Anthology of Contemporary Hoosier Writing (Indiana University Press, 2023); Selections from Gobbet (Schism Press, 2023); Neo-Decadence: 12 Manifestos (Snuggly Books, 2021); and These Poems Are Not What They Seem: An Anthology of Twin Peaks Poetry (APEP Publications, 2020).

With artist Sam Shoemaker, he completed Evidence from Lunar Rocks, a 7×7.la collaboration. In 2018, Sarah E. Brook featured one of his poems in “Viewfinding,” a public sculpture formerly located in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. His short film It Is Announced (a collaboration with Valerie Mejer Caso and photographer Barry Shapiro) premiered in the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Other poem-films have appeared in the MAKE Magazine Lit & Luz Festival, Seattle’s Institute for New Connotative Action (INCA), the Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City, and the 2021 Prague Microfestival. His short film adaptation of Outgoing Vessel (Udgående Fartøj) premiered in Sophia Kalkau and Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Ung Som Bly, a 2021 art installation featured at Rønnebæksholm in Næstved, Denmark.