MCC to Host Award-winning Poet as Part of Visiting Writers Series

Middlesex Community College will host award-winning poet Joan Houlihan as part of the college’s Visiting Writers Series at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, February 27 in the Richard and Nancy Donahue and Family Academic Arts Center Recital Hall in Lowell.

“The shape of words, the sound of words, the meanings and connotations of words; how words connect with each other to communicate to the reader, reaching both intellect and heart – this is the focus of the writer,” Houlihan said. “In writing, we engage in our highest human accomplishment ­­– communication – and, with study and practice, may advance it even further toward force, grace, honesty and beauty.”

A professor at Clark University and in Lesley University’s MFA Program, Houlihan was the founding director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript and Conference and the former Editor-in-Chief of Perihelion magazine. She has published six books of poetry, including It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award from the Boston Author’s Club.

Houlihan’s previous collections include “Shadow-feat” (Four Way, 2018) and “The Us” (Tupelo Press, 2009), which were both named “must-reads” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. She also wrote “Ay” (Tupelo Press, 2014); “The Mending Worm” (New Issues, 2006), winner of the New Issues Green Rose Award; and “Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays” (Del Sol Press, 2003).

Her poems appeared in many literary journals and been anthologized in The Iowa Anthony of New American Poetries; The Book of Irish American Poetry, 18th Century to Present, The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins, and The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making.

MCC Visiting Writers Series is co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Office of Student Engagement. For more information, contact [email protected] or call 978-656-3363.