13th Annual PoetryFest

Born in County Tyrone in 1975, Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter and former lawyer. He has published four poetry collections: To A Fault, On Purpose, Go Giants, and Feel Free, as well as three novels: Utterly Monkey, Glover’s Mistake, and Modern Gods. Awards for his writing include the Betty Trask Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is on faculty at New York University, and is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast.

Photo credit: Zadie Smith

Catherine Barnett is the author of three books of poetry: Human Hours, The Game of Boxes, and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper's, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and The Washington Post. She lives in New York City, where she is a member of the core faculty in the NYU MFA Program in Creative Writing and a Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College. A Guggenheim fellow, she won the 2018 Believer Book Award, was a finalist for the 2019 Four Quartets Prize, and in 2022 received an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Photo credit Jacqueline Mia Foster

Billy Collins is the author of thirteen books of poetry including Whale Day, The Rain in Portugal, Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, and Picnic, Lightning. Questions About Angels was selected by Edward Hirsch for the National Poetry Series. He has edited three anthologies: Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds. Collins' poetry has appeared in many periodicals including Poetry, the American Scholar, Harper's, the Paris Review, and the New Yorker. His work appears regularly in the Best American Poetry. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was chosen by the New York Public Library to be a "Literary Lion." A graduate of Holy Cross College, he received his doctorate from the University of California at Riverside. He is a former Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College (CUNY). He served two terms as United States Poet Laureate (2001-2003) and as New York State Poet (2004-2006). He is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.  His Irish roots have been traced to West Cork.

Photo credit: Suzannah Gilman Collins

Sasha Debevec-McKenney is a poet who studies the presidents. She was the 2020-2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and she received her MFA from New York University, where she was the 2018 Rona Jaffe Fellow. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Yale Review, TriQuarterly, Granta, Peach Mag, Underblong and elsewhere. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Louis de Paor has been involved with the contemporary renaissance of poetry in Irish since 1980 when he was first published in the poetry journal Innti, which he subsequently edited for a time. 

His most recent works are Obair Bhaile (LeabhairComhar, 2021) and Grá fiar/Crooked love (Bloodaxe 2022), which includes a recording of his collaboration with Dana Lyn, One day/Lá dá raibh, a bilingual performance using poetry and music to present a day in the life of an imagined village in the West of Ireland. The recording was broadcast by lyric fm and Raidió na Gaeltachta in 2021 and awarded a Gold Medal at the New York Festivals Radio Awards in 2022.

Seán Hewitt's debut collection, Tongues of Fire, was published by Jonathan Cape (2020). It won The Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and the Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by the Sunday Times as one of their “30 under 30” artists in Ireland. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (July 2022) is published with Penguin Press in the USA, and Jonathan Cape in the UK. He is a poetry critic for the Irish Times and teaches Modern British & Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, Ukraine and currently lives in the United States. Most recently, he is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) which was the finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Award for poetry.  Deaf Republic was named “best book of the year” by The Times (UK), Irish Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and many other publications. His books have been translated into over twenty languages.

Victoria Kennefick's first collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet, 2021), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, the Dalkey Emerging Writer Award and the Seamus Heaney Prize for First Collection. It was a book of the year in the Guardian, the Irish Times, the Sunday Independent and the White Review. An Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Artist, Victoria is also the current poet in residence at the Yeats Society Sligo.

Maurice Riordan’s most recent collection is Shoulder Tap, published by Faber & Faber in October 2021. Previous books include A Word from the Loki (1995), Floods (2000), The Holy Land (2007) and The Water Stealer (2013). He edited The Finest Music, an anthology of early Irish lyrics in translation, and A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science. He has received the Michael Hartnett Award, a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, and a PEN translation award. He is a former editor of the Poetry Review and is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam University. Born in Lisgoold, Co. Cork, he lives in London, where he teaches at the Faber Academy.

Patricia Smith, winner of the 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press 2017), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the LA Times Book Prize, the NAACP Image Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a National Book Award finalist. She is a Guggenheim fellow, an NEA grant recipient, a finalist for the Neudstadt Prize, a former fellow at Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo and MacDowell and and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. Smith is currently a distinguished professor for the City University of New York and a visiting professor at Princeton University, as well as an instructor for Cave Canem and the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Writing Program. She is currently at work on her first novel and second children’s picture book. Unshuttered, a book of dramatic monologues accompanied by 19th century photos of African-Americans, will be released by Northwestern University Press in February 2023.

Jessica Traynor was born in Dublin in 1984 and is a poet, essayist and librettist. Her debut collection, Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award and in 2016 was named one of the best poetry debuts of the past five years on Bustle.com. Her second collection, The Quick (Dedalus Press, 2018), was a 2019 Irish Times poetry choice. In 2019, with actor Stephen Rea, she edited Correspondences: An Anthology to Call for an End to Direct Provision, which raised funds for MASI, the movement of asylum seekers in Ireland. A Place of Pointed Stones, a pamphlet commissioned by Offaly County Council, was published by the Salvage Press in 2021. Her third collection, Pit Lullabies, was published by Bloodaxe Books on 24 March 2022. It is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Traynor has received awards including the Hennessy New Writer of the Year, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary, and the Listowel Poetry Prize. In 2016, she was named one of the “Rising Generation” of poets by Poetry Ireland. She reviews poetry for RTÉ’s Arena and for Poetry Ireland Review, and has held residencies including the Yeats Society, Sligo, and Carlow College. She is an inaugural Creative Fellow of UCD, where she completed her MA in Creative Writing in 2008, and is Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Writer in Residence for 2021-22.