Joyelle McSweeney is the award-winning author of ten books of poetry, drama, and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. Her book, Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020), was called “frightening and brilliant” by Dan Chiasson in The New Yorker and earned her the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her 2014 essay collection, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, is widely regarded as a visionary work of eco-criticism. Her debut poetry volume, The Red Bird, inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001, while her verse play, Dead Youth, or the Leaks, inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Artists in 2014.

With Carmen Maria Machado, she was the guest editor of Best American Experimental Writing 2020. She also collaborated with Don Mee Choi on translations of two short stories by Korean modernist Yi Sang, featured in Yi Sang: Selected Works from Wave Books alongside translations by Jack Jung and Sawako Nakayasu (2020). With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books, which has built readerships for a diverse array of U.S. and international authors, from Griffin Prize winners Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi to Daniel Borzutzky, Raúl Zurita, Jane Wong, Destiny Hemphill, and Valerie Hsuing.

She moved to South Bend in 2006 to join the faculty of the Creative Writing Program in the English Department at Notre Dame.