Joan Houlihan's most recent book of poetry, The Us (2009), was named a "must read" book of 2009 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Lucie Brock-Broido called the poems in The Us "just extraordinary: wildly hewn, classically construed, and skewed by an imagined lexicon...In a voice that is elemental, ancient, animistic, pre-lingual even, the speaker manages, with nothing short of magic, to communicate...in a language both syntactically inventive and radically simple." Houlihan is also the author of The Mending Worm (2005), winner of the Green Rose Award from New Issues Press, and Hand-Held Executions: Poems and Essays (2003). Her critical essays on contemporary poetry are archived on Boston Comment, and she is the managing editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review.

Houlihan  is also the founding director of the Concord Poetry Center and the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conferences. She has been a visiting professor at Columbia University and Emerson College, and is on the faculty of Lesley University's Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts.