“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:
Caroline Hagood is the author of the poetry books, Lunatic Speaks (FutureCycle Press, 2012) and Making Maxine’s Baby (Hanging Loose Press, 2015); the book-length essays, 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 speculative memoir, Goblin Mode, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project in Fall 2025.
Publishers Weekly wrote of Weird Girls, “Her skillful construction, astute observations, and candid personal confessions will draw readers in…This one packs a punch” and Pop Matters wrote, “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.”
Kirkus Reviews called Filthy Creation “compelling and absorbing”; Pop Matters declared it “perfect feminist fiction”; and Electric Literature listed it in “15 Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Summer,” stating that, "Hagood expertly captures what it is like to be young, when the world is a series of doors just waiting to be opened."
Her work has appeared in publications including Electric Literature, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, the Kenyon Review, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon, and Elle. 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 work has been most recently anthologized in Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology (A Wave Blue World, 2021).
She is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Writing and Publishing and Director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. She also teaches in the St. Francis creative writing MFA program and serves as the Faculty Advisor for The Terrier Journal. She is the Translation Editor at Hanging Loose Press, where she edits 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.
She teaches courses in American literature, first-year writing, speculative fiction and creative writing. Recent courses at St. Francis College include Literature Across Cultures, Intro to Digital Publishing, The Lyric Essay, Telling Our Stories: Theory and Practice of Autobiographical Writing, and Memoir Meets Speculative Fiction. Through recent work with Digital Humanities Across the Curriculum supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Michael V. Drake Digital Media and Composition Institute, she strives to bring new developments in the digital humanities and digital publishing into the classroom.
You can read more about her books here.
The short, first-person version:
I like books a lot.
RECENT BOOKS
WEIRD GIRLS
Praise for Weird Girls
A combination of memoir, cultural critique, and manifesto, WEIRD GIRLS traces the art monster—the writer, often coded monstrous and male, single-mindedly dedicated to the work—from ancient myth to modern literature and pop culture to ask: what happens when the art monster is a woman and/or mother? And what’s the connection between creativity and monstrosity? Told in brief, thought-provoking, often darkly humorous chapters, WEIRD GIRLS offers a groundbreaking take on art, motherhood, and of course the art monster.
"Beguiling…Hagood’s skillful construction, astute observations, and candid personal confessions will draw readers in....This one packs a punch."
—Publishers Weekly
“When I finished reading it, I resolved to buy a dozen copies and hand them out to all the women who keep me feeling powerful and supported whenever my faith or energy has wavered. Then I thought I’d send it to a few book clubs to get it a wider audience, but eventually, I thought 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.”
—Pop Matters
“I immediately began recommending this book to my female friends who are writers and artists, particularly those that have children. Hagood is turning things upside down here and rescripting the age-old, cliched narrative of the madwoman in the attic. She’s drawing on her life, her childhood reading and watching, her creative writing, and her literary, cultural criticism backgrounds to create a fluid hybrid form to inspire female creators out of the labyrinths of artistic self-doubt, in order to embrace the art monster inside them. It’s a cool and fearless journey, one which had me writing down titles for future bookstore visits and thinking about new blended ways to approach creative nonfiction writing and cultural criticism.”
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“We begin to hear our own hearts beat louder, as with joy and anticipation we welcome another great art monster to the world.”
—PANK
“Caroline Hagood’s Weird Girls is part manifesto, part homage, and part long-form essay—a tribute and a call to arms for women artists and particularly mothers to embrace what Jenny Offill calls “the art monster” in her novel, The Department of Speculation. Drawing on the monsters of her own childhood and an impressive archive of women writers, comedians, and essay theory, Hagood encourages us to embrace our inner monsters so that we can create the monstrous, specific, grotesque, witchy, and embodied work that the world so desperately needs. Her interludes on her own mothering and monstrosity are especially moving and thrilling. In this time of forced birth, right-wing religious grabs for the autonomy of marginalized people, and late capitalism, this book is a much-needed balm and call-to-arms for all of us to be our full selves.”
—Carley Moore, author of The Not Wives and Panpoclaypse
“Caroline Hagood’s decision to embrace her ‘inner monster’ and lead a writer’s life spurs her epic literary journey exploring the figure of the so-called 'weird' woman: the witch, the mother, the feminist. Hagood’s text spills gloriously from topic to topic, weaving together a hybrid narrative that rejects both genre and the idea that the mother and art monster cannot co-exist. Bold, smart, and wildly endearing, Weird Girls is a must-read for women who feel like the world can't contain them—and for those who love them.”
—Patricia Grisafi, author of Breaking Down Plath
“In Weird Girls, Caroline Hagood assembles the ultimate dream dinner party: a pantheon of brilliant, iconic, genre-defying, and game-changing women artists through time and across discipline. In sharp and spirited prose, Hagood discusses the lives and work of these artists as a means to interrogate gendered ideas of creative genius. Using elements of memoir, manifesto, and attentive close reading, Weird Girls is rich with insights that, in their jewel-like shimmering, light the path for discoveries of our own.”
—Mary-Kim Arnold, author of Litany for the Long Moment and The Fish & the Dove
FILTHY CREATION
Praise for Filthy Creation
In Filthy Creation, Dylan makes sense of her world through art. Her house is a graveyard of inspiring auto parts her mechanic father has dragged home, her family’s ongoing Frankenstein diorama, and Dylan’s own mishmash of assemblage projects that she sets on fire whenever they don’t meet her standards. Dylan and Shay fall in artsy, gothy, queer love even as Dylan is figuring out that her dead Dad—whose ghost has been visiting her even though she doesn’t believe in such things—was not in fact her biological father, but who was? As Dylan tries to find out, and find herself as an artist, she gets sucked into the world of visiting art teacher, Simon Ambrogio—learning to box and to embrace the more violent side of creativity, and running away from her secret-keeping mother. But she has raw and passionate artwork, and shouldn’t that be enough? Filthy Creation asks what it means to be a girl maker. How do girls fit into the false dichotomy between brilliant, monstrous men artists and supposedly domesticated women ones? And how can a young artist even figure out her own identity amid all this noise?
“Compelling and absorbing.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Perfect Feminist Fiction.”
—Pop Matters
“It’s a shame Mary Shelley isn’t around to offer a blurb for this tender, luminous portrait of the art monster as a modern teen. FILTHY CREATION has so much to say about art, gender, loss, and broken dreams. It’s also a triumphant coming-of-age page-turner whose young heroine grabs your heart from the first page and never lets go.”
—James Tate Hill, author of Blind Man’s Bluff
“If, as the poet Rilke noted, beauty is the beginning of a terror we are only just able to bear, Caroline Hagood's novel FILTHY CREATION shows us how to bear it. Continuing the investigation into monsters, misfits and trauma that she launched with her brilliant book-length essay, WEIRD GIRLS: WRITING THE ART MONSTER, Hagood brings Dr. Frankenstein and his creation together in the form of a visionary young woman named Dylan who is one-third pyromaniac, one third-Picasso, and one-third Poirot. To follow Dylan through this book is to follow one's own dreams, to befriend one's most troubling and beloved ghosts.”
–Sharon Mesmer, author of Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place
“What splendid strangeness is this? Love story, loss story, weird and wild escapade, artistic quest…all of these and such fun. Caroline Hagood’s FILTHY CREATION explores the peaks and pits that come with making art (and growing up), through the experiences of the singularly awesome narrator, Dylan. “This was the only way I knew how to love something,” this irrepressible character confesses, “by wanting to taste every part of it, and this was too much. I was too much,” and oh, how I loved her too-muchness and this novel’s so-muchness. Profound, poignant, ferocious, hilarious. A glorious romp.”
–Melissa Ostrom, author of Unleaving
”Hagood’s FILTHY CREATION is a brutal yet beautiful coming of age novel about what it’s like to lose a parent, while at the same time finding out who you are as an artist.”
–Erika Wurth, author of White Horse
"Hagood expertly captures what it is like to be young, when the world is a series of doors just waiting to be opened."
—Electric Literature, “15 Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Summer”
It’s worth stating from the outset that the title of Caroline Hagood’s novel Filthy Creation comes from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — and that this novel has no small amount of bizarre science present in its pages as well. Hagood here tells the story of a young woman finding her voice as an artist. Also, there are ghosts. What’s not to like?
—Tor.com, “Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for May and June 2023”
“Hagood, a poet-essayist-novelist-professor, writes with the kind of reckless-yet-careful style you want from an art monster…This is youth-in-revolt, art-monster style. And I devoured it with the hunger of an art monster, naturally.”
—Cristina Baptista