Joan Houlihan is the author of four books, most recently, Ay, from Tupelo Press, sequel to The Us, also from Tupelo. Her other books are: Hand-Held Executions, Poems & Essays and The Mending Worm, winner of the Green Rose Award from New Issues Press. She is a reviewer for the Contemporary Poetry Review and her series of essays on contemporary poetry is published under the title Boston Comment.

Houlihan's work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Boston Review, Harvard Review, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry International, Fulcrum, Passages North, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Arts, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, VOLT and is anthologized in the Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press, December 2004) and The Book of Irish-American Poetry, 18th Century to Present (University of Notre Dame, 2007).

Founder and director of the Concord Poetry Center and of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conferences, Houlihan also teaches in the Lesley University MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts.