Joseph Donahue was born in 1954 in Dallas and grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts. He was educated at Dartmouth College and Columbia University. He has lived in New York City and Seattle, and now makes his home in Durham, North Carolina, where he is Professor of the Practice in the English Department at Duke University.

Poetry. "TERRA LUCIDA, Joseph Donahue's ongoing magnum opus, is an astonishing work in which psychopompic dispatch and apocalyptic portent, by turns audacious and distraught, mix worldly exactitude with vatic unrest. Striking in its range and compression, its culling of contemporary grist and archaic light, its reportorial tone's melodic reach, it allies an unforced, unforeclosed spirituality with sifting intelligence of the severest kind. Long awaited, volume one is a beautiful, bracing, desert island book."—Nathaniel Mackey

Review

'Terra Lucida,' Joseph Donahue's ongoing magnum opus, is an astonishing work in which psychopompic dispatch and apocalyptic portent, by turns audacious and distraught, mix worldly exactitude with vatic unrest. Striking in its range and compression, its culling of contemporary grist and archaic light, its reportorial tone's melodic reach, it allies an unforced, unforeclosed spirituality with sifting intelligence of the severest kind. Long awaited, volume one is a beautiful, bracing, desert island book. --Nathaniel Mackey

'Terra Lucida,' lucid simplicity. Each word treated like a pearl, washed of all sea silt, to be set, not in a ring, but in the rungs of a gnostic ladder. The poems as consecutive salti mortali from rung to rung -- one reads suspensefully: if the vision were to fail, a fall. But this visionary, anagogical work by a poet mad with light (en-light-ened), moving between our universe and an alternative one of potential perfection, throbs like a cosmos, each verse a breath. Relentlessly, the breaths move on -- like wavelets, small only because they work in an immense, interminable ocean. A luminist purification of the art; Aphrodite reborn: American poetry rediviva. --Nathaniel Tarn

These are poems of the corona, of a brilliance only visible when the source is darkened. The language of 'Terra Lucida' seems to be turning into light itself, or turning the lights of the universe on and off, as if it's the last ten seconds of our life. --Mary Margaret Sloan