Joyelle McSweeney

Joyelle McSweeney is a professor of English and department chair of the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame.

A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of nine books spanning poetry, prose, drama, translation, and criticism. 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. 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 and awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. 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.

McSweeney has twice been awarded The Rev. Edmund P. Joyce C.S.C. Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.