Erin L. McCoy

Biography

Erin L. McCoy’s poetry collection, Wrecks (Noemi, 2025), was a finalist for the Noemi Book Award. Her debut novel, Underlake, is forthcoming (Doubleday, 2026). McCoy’s poetry and fiction have been featured in The American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Pleiades, Conjunctions, and other publications, and she was a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize.

Erin McCoy self-portrait.

See Work

POETRY / Summer 2025

The researcher (2020) dreams of Shanawdithit (1828)

By Erin L. McCoy

When I sleep, you dream, turning and turning
on a soft earth.

Light drools down, blinds me. I can’t see your cheek
curve. Words rise

POETRY / Summer 2025

Exhibit A: Eldey Island, Iceland, 1844

By Erin L. McCoy

Squint, reader, through the sudden fog: 
                            the sea’s gnaw and lick-bright:
Eldey, pillar of stone: where two
                            great auks survive, briefly—
before reenacting the end of their story

POETRY / Summer 2025

Uncanny valley

By Erin L. McCoy

Pink millions of passenger pigeons slammed the sun shut again and again for fifty thousand years. Above the Ohio River, a solar eclipse for three days straight as one flock passed over.