Eavan Boland—A Transatlantic Tribute

Christina Ablaza is the Program Manager in Creative Writing at Stanford University, a role in which she worked closely with Eavan for over a decade. 

Geraldine Byrne Nason is Ireland’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, a post she has held since 2017, and in which capacity she commissioned Eavan to write a poem, ‘Our Future Will Become the Past of Other Women,’ to mark the centenary of women’s suffrage in Ireland. Prior to arriving at the UN, Geraldine served as Ireland’s Ambassador to France and, before that, as Second Secretary General at the Department of the Taoiseach. 

Alvy Carragher is an Irish poet and author based in Canada. Her first collection, Falling in love with broken things was published in 2016 by Salmon Poetry. Chicken House Books published her young adult novel, The Cantankerous Molly Darling, in 2019. Her second collection, The Men I Keep Under My Bed, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry

Chelsea Clinton is a global health advocate and award-winning children’s author. Whilst completing her undergraduate at Stanford, she attended lectures and readings hosted by Eavan and came to admire her as a poet, a teacher, and an activist. 

Jenny A. Durkan is the 56th Mayor of Seattle, and the first woman to lead the City in nearly a century. Prior to becoming Mayor, she was a civic leader and nationally-recognized attorney. From 2009 to 2014, she served as the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, becoming the first openly gay U.S. Attorney in the country’s history. Whilst at college, Durkan spent a school year in Dublin, studying Irish history, literature, and language at The School of Irish Studies. In that time, she met and studied with Eavan, whose work she has read and admired ever since. 

Rachael Gilkey has been at Irish Arts Center since 2008 and served as Director of Programming and Education since 2012, and has served as a committee member for the Bronx Book Festival since its inaugural outing in 2018. She holds a Masters in Irish Studies from National University of Ireland, Galway. She was awarded the Irish Echo Top 40 Under 40: Irish American Young Leaders award in 2012.

Marie Howe was born in 1950 in Rochester, New York. She worked as a newspaper reporter and teacher before receiving her MFA from Columbia University in 1983. She is the author of Magdalene (W. W. Norton, 2017), which was long-listed for the National Book Award; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W.W.Norton, 2009), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1998); and The Good Thief (Persea Books, 1988), which was selected by Margaret Atwood for the 1987 National Poetry Series. 

Maureen Kennelly commenced as Director of the Arts Council of Ireland / An Chomhairle Ealaíon in April this year. She was previously Director of Poetry Ireland, where she and her team collaborated with Eavan Boland as Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and across a number of live literature events and diversity projects. She was previously the Director of Kilkenny Arts Festival and the Mermaid Arts Centre, and is a graduate of UCD and NUI Galway. 

Loah is Sallay Garnett, a singer-songwriter of Irish and Sierra Leonean origin

who grew up between Ireland and West Africa. She released her debut work
This Heart in 2017, followed by a whole work of remixes by Irish producers.
She co-wrote Hozier’s charting hit ‘Someone New’ from his debut record, and
has since regularly collaborated with and shared stages with many artists. This
year she releases an album with Irish producer Bantum. 

Mary Robinson served as the seventh President of Ireland, the first womanto hold that office. She also served as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Solmaz Sharif is the author of Look, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Harper’s, and elsewhere. She is currently an assistant professor at Arizona State University

Belinda McKeon is a novelist and playwright. She was the founding director of the Irish Arts Center Poetryfest in 2009. She teaches at Rutgers University.

Paula Meehan was born and lives in Dublin. She was appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2013 to 2016. Her public lectures from the Professorship, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, are published by UCD Press. Geomantic, her latest collection of poems, is published by Dedalus Press, which will also publish her much-anticipated Selected Poems later this year.

Daniel Mulhall is Ireland’s Ambassador to the United States. He has previously served as Ambassador in Kuala Lumpur, Berlin, and, most recently, London, a post Eavan’s father also held. President of the Yeats Society, he is a great lover of Irish poetry, tweeting a poem each day over the past six years. 

Michael Tient is a student from Marino College, Dublin, who won First Prize in the senior section of this year’s Poetry Aloud, an all-Ireland poetry speaking competition run by Poetry Ireland in partnership with the National Library of Ireland and University College Cork.

Tobias Wolff is amongst America’s most celebrated writers. Alongside his memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, he has published four short story collections and two award-winning novels. In 2015, he received a National Medal of Arts from President Obama. As an educator, he has been a senior member of faculty at Stanford University since 1997, in the course of which he came to know Eavan as a close friend and revered colleague.

Kevin Young is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and poetry editor of The New Yorker, where he also hosts the poetry podcast. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.