“Profoundly unique and honest...somehow executed with an astonishing lack of ego. Hagood will break your heart with her naked sincerity; a masterful, singular writer who sheds light with every page.”
—MARY-LOUISE PARKER
The long third-person version:
CREATIVE WRITING & TEACHING
Caroline Hagood is the author of the poetry books, Lunatic Speaks (FutureCycle Press, 2012) and Making Maxine’s Baby (Hanging Loose Press, 2015); the creative nonfiction books, Ways of Looking at a Woman (Hanging Loose Press, 2019) and Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022); and the novels, Ghosts of America (Hanging Loose Press, 2021) and Filthy Creation (MadHat Press 2023).
Her book, Death and Other Speculative Fictions: An Essay in Prose Poems, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil Press in January 2025. Her speculative memoir, Goblin Mode, shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project in September 2025. Her book, Women of Fantasy in Their Own Words: Conversations with Contemporary Authors, edited with Sébastien Doubinsky, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in December 2025.
At St. Francis College in Brooklyn, she is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Writing and Publishing; Director of Undergraduate Writing; MFA Creative Nonfiction Coordinator; and Assistant Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence (Assistant Director of Curriculum Design & Assessment Specialist).
Her work has appeared in publications including Electric Literature, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, the Kenyon Review, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon, and Elle.
PopMatters wrote of Weird Girls, “I’d like to buy a hundred copies and donate one to every public library within a 100-mile radius of my house to ensure that the next generation of women growing up all around me will have easy access to this necessary little lighthouse with its bloody but unbowed heart of feminist grotesquerie.”
Hagood is a recipient of a 2021 NYFA City Arts Corps Grant. Her novel, Misfits, was a finalist for the 2021 University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize. Her essay, “Cooking My Father Back to Life,” was a Finalist for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Essay Contest. Her work has been most recently anthologized in Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology (A Wave Blue World, 2021) and 36 New York Poets (Shinchosha, 2022).
EDITING & SCHOLARSHIP
She is the Translation Editor at Hanging Loose Press, where she edits select titles and The Loose Translation Award, jointly sponsored by Hanging Loose Press and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation of Queens College, CUNY.
She holds a PhD from Fordham, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize. Her dissertation, Women Who Like to Watch: Twentieth Century American Cinepoetry, explored intersections between poetry and film. She’s interested in hybridity and texts that bend and blend genres. Her academic articles have appeared in journals including Resources for American Literary Study, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture. These essays cover topics including speculative fiction; antiracist, multimodal composition pedagogy; the rhetoric of humor; Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red; Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves; Theresa Cha’s Dictee; and the representation of the Caribbean in U.S. popular culture.
You can read more about her books here.
You can read her Substack here.
The short first-person version:
I like books a lot.
COMING SOON…
GOBLIN MODE: A SPECULATIVE MEMOIR
Coming Fall 2025 from Santa Fe Writers Project: GOBLIN MODE: A MEMOIR WITH LIES, shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award
In Caroline Hagood’s Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir, the protagonist, who is and is not Caroline Hagood, takes a surreal odyssey through humor, horror, and plague-time Brooklyn. In a supercharged three-day stretch, she navigates a city full of flashers and parrots who talk to her on subways, makes an ominous visit to a bioluminescent bay in Fajardo, Puerto Rico at Christmastime, mothers two spirited children in an apartment that’s probably haunted, and lives in a world that may or may not be about to shut down. This state of goblin mode that she inhabits is metaphorical, said to have taken root since Covid and all the other sociopolitical unrest. But it’s also very real, in the form of an actual goblin that has been following her around since childhood, daring her to live more fiercely...
Caroline Hagood takes the reader on a wild ride, using surreal stories to process the recent death of her father. She mourns by making language work as a time machine to go back and let her father live again, bending space and time to make a place for him, if only in this book that is, above all, a séance. Death and Other Speculative Fictions is for anyone who is grieving the loss of a loved one and searching everywhere for answers.
“Caroline Hagood's vibrant, surprising prose poems speculate on the nature of human connection and loss with astonishing, understated force."
—Idra Novey
“In the aftermath of her father’s death, Caroline Hagood turns to a steady diet of speculative fiction for solace. In this haunting sequence of prose poem meditations, she draws on sources as rich as Charles Yu, Kurt Vonnegut, Madeleine L’Engle, and filmmaker George Miller to construct an alternate mythology to help process her grief. One is gripped by the vulnerability, the raw tenderness of her voice, yet at the same time inspired by its provocations. Hagood shows how the speculative imagination, rather than a mode of escape, is a powerful tool for understanding the real–even rewriting it. “It’s by way of the fabrications, the coming at it from outlandish angles…that we can really see how things are here on earth and how they need to change.” This book charts the road between life and death with furious creativity and vision.”
—Elaine Equi
“Death and Other Speculative Fictions is a gorgeous tribute, a survival diary, a love letter, an ode to a father, to speculative fiction, to time, and to life. It cobbles together from real and imaginary places and the thresholds in between, a means to think about the unthinkable, and to go on with the impossible and beautiful task of living in a world that is both flooding and on fire, while letting go of those we love most, and eventually ourselves. It is full of grief, wonder, awe, hope and love. I was so moved, and my world was expanded by this book. Like Furiosa’s mechanical arm, it is a thing of beauty, born out of loss, pain and necessity.”
—Ananda Lima
“In this beautiful and devastating essay in poems, Caroline Hagood’s voice is fully alive, witty, searching and razor-sharp. What is so unique about this book is how she balances vivid descriptions of 21st century life with searing questions about the relationship between grief and speculative fiction. By reminding the reader how strange everyday life has become and how quotidian science fiction can feel, she reinvigorates hybrid writing, bringing a new liveliness and incision to the genre. An instant classic.”
—Joanna Fuhrman
“Have you looked into the eye of death lately? If you are not ready to do so, no worries, Caroline Hagood has done it for you. In Hagood’s new collection, DEATH AND OTHER SPECULATIVE FICTIONS: An Essay in Prose Poems, you will find a hauntingly thorough scanning on what it means to lose a parent in a 21st Century vernacular that engages Furiosa, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Blade Runner 2049, and Kurt Vonnegut. For all that we might know, medically and scientifically, about what happens to our bodies when we die, Hagood wants to know more about the plane where death has no meaning and she means to find it. In this new work, Hagood becomes “a student of time, space, creativity and sorrow” so that we may get a glimpse of the beyond.”
—Jiwon Choi