Who Is Joyelle McSweeney? Know About The New Jeopardy Champion
Published Date: 04 Nov, 2025 Updated date: 04 Nov, 2025
By
Daniel Roffer
Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and professor at the University of Notre Dame. She has made a new name as a contestant on this season’s trivia game show, Jeopardy.
Who is Joyelle McSweeney and what is her job? Know about the Jeopardy champion’s wiki, family, professional and personal life details below.
Joyelle McSweeney made her Jeopardy debut as a contestant on Monday, 4 November 2025. She emerged as a champion with a final winnings of $17,700.
As a returning champion, she will appear again on the show on the 5 November episode. There, she will meet two new contestants: Joseph Evans, a middle school history teacher from Beltsville, Maryland, and Aaron Himmel, a stay-at-home dad from Long Island, New York.
Also Read: Jeopardy Contestant Robbie Ellis: Explore Personal Life & Career
Joyelle McSweeney Wikipedia, Age & Education
McSweeney has reached the age of 46 now. She was born Joyelle H McSweeney in the year 1976 and celebrates her birthday with her friends and family on 1st June.
Originally from South Bend, Indiana, she spent her early life with her family there. Moreover, she is of European descent as her grandparents came from Eastern Europe, and they worked in dying factories in South Bend.
Joyelle holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and American Literature from Harvard University, graduating in 1997. She then earned an M.Phil. in English Studies from the University of Oxford in 1999. Additionally, she obtained a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing/Poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2001.
Joyelle McSweeney Is A Poet & Educator
McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and educator. She is the author of 10 books spanning poetry, prose, drama, translation, and criticism.
Currently, she is a Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She has twice been awarded The Rev. Edmund P. Joyce C.S.C. Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Joyelle’s debut volume, The Red Bird (2001), was selected by Allen Grossman to inaugurate the Fence Modern Poets Series; her verse play, Dead Youth, or, the Leaks (2012), inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Playwrights. Her poetry collection, Toxicon and Arachne (2020), called a “frightening and brilliant book” by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker, was featured in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, MS., and the Poetry Foundation. It was also awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America.
Likewise, her influential essay collection The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014) proposes a decadent ecopoetics and reads modern and contemporary literature in light of ecological phenomena such as mutation, extinction, and decay. She is a co-translator of the award-winning Yi Sang, Selected Works (2020). Her recent book was Death Styles (2024) from Nightboat Books.
McSweeney was recognized with the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, honoring exceptional accomplishment in any genre.
Similar: Who Is Aaron Levine? Know About The Jeopardy Champion & Anchor
Meet Joyelle McSweeney Husband & Daughter
McSweeney is leading a happy married life with her husband, Johannes Göransson.
Göransson, aged 52, is co-editor of Action Books and has translated the work of Aase Berg, Henry Parland, Ann Jaderlund, and other Swedish and Finnish-Swedish poets. Born and raised in Skåne, Sweden, he has been living in the US for many years.
Moreover, Joyelle and her husband are the co-founders of the international press Action Books. It has built US readerships for poets from Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and elsewhere while advocating for translators and the act of translation itself.
McSweeney and her husband had a daughter named Arachne. Sadly, their daughter died in October 2017 of a congenital birth defect when she was just 13 days old.