Joyelle McSweeney is the author of nine books of poetry, prose, drama, and essays. Her interests include the sonic, the toxic and the lyric. Her most recent book of poetry, Toxicon and Arachne (2020), was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize for mid-career poets. She is also a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Poems, which has just been awarded the 2021 Scaglione Prize for Translated Literature by the MLA. McSweeney's 2014 verse play Dead Youth, or the Leaks, was chosen to inaugurate the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Writers while her debut volume, The Red Bird (2002) inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Prize. She is also the author of The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, a book of Decadent ecopoetics published by the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series in 2015. With Johannes Göransson, she is a founding editor of Action Books, which for nearly twenty years has built US readerships for poets such as Raúl Zurita, Aase Berg, and Kim Hyesoon while centering translators such as Don Mee Choi and Daniel Borzutzky, among many others. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and directs the MFA program at Notre Dame.