14th 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

Tara Bergin is from Dublin and has published three collections of poetry with Carcanet Press: This Is Yarrow, winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry; The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx, which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes; and most recently Savage Tales, listed as one of the Irish Times' ‘best new poetry books of 2022’ and shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2023. Tara now lives in the north of England and teaches part-time in the creative writing program at Newcastle University.

Sara Berkeley grew up in Ireland and was educated at Trinity College Dublin, Southbank University London, and UC Berkeley. Some of the Things I’ve Seen is her seventh collection of poetry, published in March 2023 by Wake Forest University Press and previously in October 2022 as The Last Cold Day by The Gallery Press, Ireland. She has also had a collection of short stories and a novel published. Her poetry has been widely anthologized, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and shortlisted for the Irish Times' Poetry Now award alongside Seamus Heaney. Sara lived for many years in the San Francisco Bay Area, but she now makes her home in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she works full time as a hospice nurse.

Timothy Donnelly’s most recent book, Chariot, was published in 2023 by Wave Books. His previous books include The Problem of the Many, winner of the inaugural Big Other Poetry Prize, and The Cloud Corporation, winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with his family.

Elisa Gonzalez is the author of the poetry collection Grand Tour (FSG 2023). Her poetry and prose appears in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the New York Times Magazine, the Drift, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Rolex Foundation, and the U.S. Fulbright program. In 2020, she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. She lives in Brooklyn.

Terrance Hayes is a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant and the author of How to Be Drawn; Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series; and Wind in a Box. He is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Thomas McCarthy was born in Co. Waterford in 1954 and educated at University College Cork. He worked for many years at Cork City Libraries before he withdrew to write fulltime in 2014. He has won many awards for his poetry, including the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the O’Shaughnessy Prize, and the Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award. His first collection, The First Convention, was published by The Dolmen Press, Dublin, in 1978, and his tenth collection, Prophecy, was published by Carcanet Press (UK) in 2019. A former editor of Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review, his latest book, Memory, Poetry and the Party: Journals 1974-2014, is published by The Gallery Press, Ireland.

Mary Noonan teaches French literature at University College Cork. Her first collection, The Fado House (Dedalus, 2012) was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and the Strong/Shine Award. A limited edition pamphlet—Father—was published by Bonnefant Press (NL) in 2015. Her second collection, Stone Girl, was published by Dedalus Press in February 2019. It was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize in 2020. She was poetry editor of the literary journal Southword 2016-18. Her poems have been published in Poetry Review, PN Review, The Threepenny Review, New England Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Manchester Review, among others.

Sharon Olds has written thirteen books of poetry.  Balladz was a finalist for the National Book Award and was long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Stag’s Leap (2012) received the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize.  Olds holds the Erich Maria Remarque Chair at New York University’s graduate program in creative writing, where she helped to found workshop programs for residents of Coler-Goldwater Hospital, and for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Tom Sleigh is the author of eleven books of poetry, including his most recent book, The King’s Touch, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and published by Graywolf Press in February 2022. His collection, Army Cats, was the winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Space Walk won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award. In addition, Far Side of the Earth won an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Dreamhouse was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and The Chain was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. Station Zed was published in 2015 and includes Sleigh’s long poem about Iraq, “Homage to Bashō,” a version of which received Poetry Magazine’s Editors Prize. In 2018 a book of prose collecting his essays on refugees in the Middle East and Africa, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In An Age Of Refugees, was published by Graywolf Press as a companion piece to House of Fact, House of Ruin. Sleigh has also published a previous book of essays, Interview With a Ghost, and a translation of Euripides' Herakles. Widely anthologized, his poems and prose appear in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Village Voice, Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, and other literary magazines, as well as The Best of the Best American Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Best American Travel Writing, and The Pushcart Anthology. He has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, a Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, a Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, an Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fund, a Guggenheim grant, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among many others. Sleigh is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, New York. During the last decade, he has also worked as a journalist in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Iraq, and Libya.