The Elliston Poet-in-Residence
The George Elliston Poetry Fund has fostered the development of promising young poets and honored the achievement of established poets since 1951. Each year, through the Poet-in-Residence Program, a distinguished poet comes to UC to give public lectures and readings, while conducting seminars and workshops with graduate writers. The Elliston Fund also supports a writers series that has brought Nobel Prize Laureates, U.S. and British Poet Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, and National Book Award winners– from early campus residencies by Robert Frost to more recently hosted Elliston Poets such as Laureate Tracy K. Smith and 2017 Pulitzer Prize Winner Tyehimba Jess. Every reading has free and open to the public since the room's opening in 1951.
Joyelle McSweeney, Elliston Poet-in-Residence
Talk
March 31, 2026; 5:30 pm EST
Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library
Poetry Reading
April 2, 2026; 5:30 pm EST
Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library
Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. McSweeney's recent 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 US and international authors from Griffin Prize winners Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi to Daniel Borzutzky and Raúl Zurita to Jane Wong, Destiny Hemphill and Valerie Hsuing. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at Notre Dame.