At Home With Irish Arts Center: 12th 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 Chair of Creative Writing in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast. 

Photo credit: Zadie Smith

Ailbhe Darcy is a poet from Dublin. Her most recent collection, Insistence (Bloodaxe 2018), was set in South Bend, Indiana, and won Wales Book of the Year, the Roland Mathias Prize and the Pigott Prize. With David Wheatley, she is co-editor of A History of Irish Women’s Poetry, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She lives and teaches in Cardiff.

Photo credit: Adrian Pope

Originally from Belfast in Northern Ireland, Miriam Gamble currently lives in Scotland; she lectures in creative writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her collections are The Squirrels Are Dead (2010), Pirate Music (2014) and What Planet (2019), all published by Bloodaxe. What Planet won the 2020 Pigott Poetry Prize.

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 at NYU.

Photo credit: Victoria Smith

Ada Limón, a current Guggenheim fellow, is the author of five poetry collections, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her fourth book Bright Dead Things was named a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program and lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Photo credit: Lucas Marquardt

Paula Meehan was born in Dublin where she still lives. She studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and at Eastern Washington University in the U.S. She has published seven collections of poetry which have received both popular and critical acclaim. She has moderated workshops in the community, in the prisons, in recovery programmes and has worked extensively with emerging poets inside and outside the universities. 

Her work has been translated into French, German, Galician, Italian, Japanese, Estonian, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, Chinese, Dutch and Irish. She has received the Butler Literary Award for Poetry presented by the Irish American Cultural Institute, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award for Dharmakaya, 2000, The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry, 2015, a Cholmondelay Award for Geomantic, 2017, and the PPI Award for Radio Drama. She was honoured with election to Aosdána, the Irish Academy for the Arts, in 1996. She was Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2013 – 2016, and her public lectures from these years, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, was published by UCD Press in 2016. Her selected poems, As If By Magic, was published in October by Dedalus Press, Dublin.