Joseph Donahue (1954– ) is an American poet, critic, and editor. Born in Dallas, Texas and growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts, Donahue attended Dartmouth College for his undergraduate degree and went on to Columbia University and lived for many years in New York City. He now resides in Durham, North Carolina, where he is a professor of the Practice at Duke University. His published books include: Before Creation (1989), Monitions of the Approach (1991), World Well Broken (1995), Terra Lucida (1998), Terra Lucida XVI-XX (1999), Incidental Eclipse (2003), In This Paradise: Terra Lucida XXI-XL (2004), Dark Church (2015), Red Flash on a Black Field (2015), Wind Maps I-VII (2018), The Disappearance of Fate (2019), Infinite Criteria (2022), Terra Lucida XIII–XX1 (2024), and Disfluency, Collected Uncollected Poems (2024).

Of the same collection, Gustaf Sobin stated that "In these sustained breath-strips, life's disparate, hopelessly disassociated elements find themselves spliced into single, all-inclusive sequences. In associating myth with matter, our deepest longings with our most dire anxieties, Donahue strikes an uninterrupted series of grace notes..."