“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 really short first-person version:
I like books a lot.
The long third-person version:
CREATIVE WRITING & TEACHING
Caroline Hagood is the author of the poetry books, Lunatic Speaks, Death and Other Speculative Fictions: An Essay in Prose Poems, and Making Maxine’s Baby; the creative nonfiction books, Ways of Looking at a Woman and Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster; the novels, Ghosts of America and Filthy Creation; and the novel/creative nonfiction book Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir.
Her book, Women of Fantasy in Their Own Words: Conversations with Contemporary Authors, edited with Sébastien Doubinsky, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2026.
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 Interim Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies.
Her work has appeared in publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, the Kenyon Review, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon, and Elle.
Electric Literature featured Goblin Mode on its “Best Nonfiction of 2025,” writing of it, “Blending humor, surrealism, and the ordinary challenges of daily life, the memoir explores what it means to live with boldness and abandon”; and on its “15 Small Press Books You Don’t Want to Miss This Fall,” writing of it, “Wry and canny, thoughtful and provocative, reading Hagood is a true joy.”
Locus Magazine: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field wrote of Death and Other Speculative Fictions, “The way Hagood uses science fiction to talk about, to think about, so big and outlandish and impossible a topic as death is genuinely moving. Reading Death and Other Speculative Fictions changed how I look at some of the books on my shelves, some of the deaths in my life: a new feeling for what some of these stories are, what they can do, what they cannot. Highly recommended.”
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 and her novel Goblin Mode was a finalist for the 2024 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. Her essay, “Cooking My Father Back to Life,” was a finalist for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Essay Contest.
Her writing has been most recently anthologized in Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology and 36 New York Poets. Her work has been translated into Japanese and Korean. She is represented by Kim Carson Bodie at Susan Schulman Literary Agency.
EDITING & SCHOLARSHIP
Hagood 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 such topics as 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.
Her most recent article, “Remixing the College Essay: Antiracist and Multimodal Assignments for First-Year Writers,” co-authored with Dr. Felisa Baynes-Ross, Mira Zaman, and Caitlin Cawley, was recently published in Duke University Press’s Pedagogy journal.
You can read more about her books here.
You can read her Substack here.