15th 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

Vona Groarke has published thirteen books with Gallery Books, Ireland's foremost poetry publisher, most recently Woman of Winter (2023), and Link: Poet and World (2021). Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara, a poetic account of Irish women domestic servants in 1890s New York (which arose out of her time as a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library 2018—19), was published by New York University Press in 2022. She is the current Writer in Residence at St John's College, Cambridge, in the U.K.

Nuar Alsadir's most recent book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf Press/ Fitzcarraldo Editions), was a TIME  magazine must-read of 2022 and a Publisher's Weekly  Best Book of 2022. She is also the author of two poetry collections: Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and More Shadow Than Bird. She is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and a member of the curatorial board of The Racial Imaginary Institute. She works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan to a French mother and an American father. He has published eleven collections of poetry and received many awards, including the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  He has also published Orphic Paris, a memoir.  He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

Leontia Flynn’s first book These Days (Jonathan Cape, 2004) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, in the same year she was named one of twenty Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Book Society in association with The Guardian newspaper.  Her second collection Drives (Jonathan Cape) was published in 2008, she also won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a major Individual Artists Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in that year. Her third collection, Profit and Loss, was the Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2011 and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She received the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry in 2013 and the AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Literary Award in 2014. Her fourth collection The Radio, was published in 2017, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize and won the Irish Times poetry prize.  She has also published a critical monograph on the poet Medbh McGuckian (2014), and a pamphlet of translations of the poet Catullus, Slim New Book (Lifeboat 2020). She was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022 and is a professor at Queen’s University.  Her fifth collection, Taking Liberties, was published with Cape in 2023.

Ishion Hutchinson is the author of the poetry collections School of Instructions, House of Lords and Commons, and Far District. His awards include the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, Hutchinson is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University.

John Kelly is from Enniskillen in County Fermanagh. His first poetry collection Notions was published in 2018 by Dedalus Press. A second collection Space, was published in 2022. His work has appeared in numerous publications including the Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, Oxford Magazine, and several anthologies. His poem Winter’s Blessing features on the 2024 Grammy winning box set For The Birds: The Birdsong Project. A novel, From Out of the City, was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year at the 2014 Irish Book Awards. A radio play, The Pipes, starring Barry McGovern and with music by Liam O’Flynn was broadcast on RTÉ. He lives in Dublin.

Fran Lock is a sometimes itinerant dog whisperer and the author of numerous chapbooks and thirteen poetry collections, most recently Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, 2023), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023, and a disgusting lie: further adventures through the neoliberal hell-mouth (Pamenar Press, 2023). White/Other (87 Press, 2022), a collection of hybrid lyric riffs, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Fran was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022—23), researching feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval Bestiary. Vulgar Errors/Feral Subjects, a collection of essays based on her work at Cambridge, was published by Out-Spoken Press last year. Fran is a commissioning editor and maid of all work at the radical arts and culture cooperative Culture Matters, where she edited the mammoth anthology The Cry of the Poor (2021) and launched the Culture Matters pamphlet series in 2023. She is a member of the new Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and she edits the "Soul Food" column for Communist Review. Fran teaches online for Poetry School and is an occasional co-host on the cross-cultural poetry podcast Social yet Distanced. Fran is a proud pitbull parent. She hates the Tories and all who sail in them. She lives between Cambridge and Kent.

Shane McCrae’s most recent books of poetry are Cain Named the Animal, a finalist for the Forward Prize and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award, and The Many Hundreds of the Scent. His memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, was published in 2023. Also in 2023, he was awarded the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his other awards include a Lannan Literary Award and a Whiting Writer's Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Maggie Millner's work has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, and Kenyon Review among other publications. She is a lecturer at Yale and a senior editor at The Yale Review. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Declan Ryan was born in Mayo and lives in London. His first collection, Crisis Actor, is published in the UK by Faber & Faber and in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. His reviews and essays have appeared in journals including the New York Review of Books, The Baffler, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Poetry, the Irish Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Boxing News.