About Me

Erin L. McCoy is the author of Wrecks, forthcoming from Noemi Press in October 2025 and a finalist for the Noemi Book Awards.

Erin is a writer, scholar, book editor, and educator in creative writing and Spanish and Latin American literature. She won second place in the 2019–2020 Rougarou Poetry Contest, judged by CAConrad, and her work has appeared in Best New Poets twice, selected by Kaveh Akbar in 2021 and Natalie Diaz in 2017. Her poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in West Branch, Narrative, Bennington Review, Pleiades, Conjunctions, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod International Journal, and other publications.

Erin holds an MFA in poetry and an MA in Spanish and Latin American literature from the University of Washington. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship; a Critical Languages Scholarship; an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship; the University of Washington’s Grace Milliman Pollock Scholarship; and the Oakley Hall III Memorial Scholarship to attend the Communityof Writers in California, among other awards.

Erin serves as acquisitions editor at Entre Ríos Books, where she focuses on discovering Argentine poets for translation. She works as a freelance book editor and proofreader for such publishers as Penguin Random House and Cavendish Square. She is an assistant poetry editor at Narrative magazine. She has also served as an assistant poetry editor and fiction reader for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature & Fine Arts.

Erin has also won nearly two dozen awards in photojournalism. 

Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Erin has lived in Malaysia, Spain, Seattle, and two St. Petersburgs—Russia and Florida. Her writing is deeply rooted in place—and haunted by Louisville, most of all.

When she was a kid, Erin’s father worked at a zoo, and the time she spent one-on-one with the cockatoos and orangutans before the zoo opened each morning laid the foundation for her poetic engagement with themes of environmental justice.