We are excited to introduce this year’s judge of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Contest, Joyelle McSweeney!
As a poet, prose writer, playwright, critic, and publisher, Joyelle McSweeney is interested in the ways in which writing moves among genres, languages, media, and materials. She is the author of ten books, most recently the double poetry collection Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020), “frightening and brilliant” by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker; The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (University of Michigan Poets on Poetry series, 2015), a book of goth eco-criticism; and the verse play Dead Youth, or, The Leaks, which won the inaugural Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Playwrights. With Johannes Göransson, McSweeney founded and edits Action Books, an international press for poetry and translation. She lives in the Rust Belt and teaches at Notre Dame.
