Joseph Donahue

Joseph Donahue, a poet, critic, and editor, was born on September 22, 1954, in Texas and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts. He attended Dartmouth College for his undergraduate studies before getting a PhD at Columbia University in 1993.

Donahue’s poetry collections include The Disappearance of Fate (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019); Wind Maps I–VII (Talisman House, 2018); Red Flash on a Black Field (Black Square Editions, 2015); and Dark Church (Verge Books, 2015), the third installment of his ongoing Terra Lucida serial project.

Poet Evie Shockley cites Donahue as one of her influences, writing,

A related quality of Joe’s poetry that he also encouraged me (by his example) to value is a kind of complexity in which one discerns the poet’s struggle to do justice to the intellectual and ethical intricacy, the affective charge, the sublime (in the sense of awful) unresolvability of certain problems and ideas, by searching for aesthetic strategies that are appropriate for and up to the task.

Donahue teaches at Duke University and lives in Durham, North Carolina.