Ips calligraphus (Germar) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) is a bark beetle native to eastern North America, where it has historically acted as a secondary pest of stressed and dying trees. However, as I. calligraphus expands its range and forests encounter additional stressors posed by disturbance events, it has become an economically significant pest affecting pine production. The ability of I. calligraphus to overwhelm natural tree defense mechanisms lies in its ability to coordinate mass attacks, relying on a suite of semiochemicals including aggregation pheromones, sex pheromones, and host volatiles. The genetic basis underpinning this complex chemical communication system has been investigated in other scolytines, but no next generation sequencing data were previously available for I. calligraphus. For this study, adult male and female head mRNA samples were sequenced and the resulting 336 million high-quality reads were used for a de novo assembly. After predicting coding regions, redundant sequences were removed resulting in 31,077 unigenes. Insect entries for chemosensory gene families like odorant receptors and odorant binding proteins from the NCBI non-redundant database were used as BLAST queries to the transcriptome, allowing for candidate sequences to be identified. Additionally, candidate sequences were identified using gene ontology terms generated using eggNOG-mapper, and confirmed using InterProScan. Newly identified chemosensory transcripts could serve as future targets to reduce mass aggregation using molecular-based management tools such as RNA interference, and are valuable for examining the relationship and evolutionary history of olfactory and gustatory genes among bark beetle species, several of which represent highly destructive forest pests.