Muldoon's Picnic 10th Anniversary Extravaganza

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951 and now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for more than thirty years. He is the author of thirteen collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002)—for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize—and Frolic and Detour (2019), as well as Selected Poems 1968-2014 (2016). Roger Rosenblatt, writing recently in the New York Times Book Review, described Paul Muldoon as “one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems—word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. And angry. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.” 

Photo credit: Gary Doak

Singer-songwriter, record producer, independent label owner, and painter Chris Harford makes Hopewell, New Jersey his home. A founding member of Rogue Oliphant, Harford has been collaborating with Paul Muldoon for over a decade now.

Ray Kubian, a long-time collaborator with legendary poet Paul Muldoon, has lent his drumming, vocal, and songwriting talents to bands led by Richard Lloyd (Television), indie rock phenom Chris Forsyth, the Irish classic rock band Horslips, and Detroit-based band Electric Six, among others. He is co-founder of Moon Clouds Music, a teaching and production studio in the greater New York area.

David is an award-winning film and television composer. His first film score was for the controversial epic Heaven's Gate. It led to a four-film collaboration with director Michael Cimino, and a Golden Globe nomination for Year Of The Dragon. Other long-standing relationships include Mexican auteur Arturo Ripstein and Maggie Greenwald (Ballad of Little Jo, Songcatcher). His score for Ripstein's Deep Crimson won Best Musical Score at both the Venice and Havana Film Festivals. David’s score for the A&E mini-series Broken Trail (directed by Walter Hill) was nominated for an Emmy. His most recent score is for the Showtime limited series George & Tammy, starring Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain.

David also has composed for scripted podcasts, including Audible’s The Big Lie, starring Jon Hamm and created by John Mankiewicz. 

David is a world-renowned musician, coming to national attention at age 19 as part of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. He subsequently formed the Alpha Band with fellow Dylan alumnus T Bone Burnett and Steven Soles. He was featured in the Martin Scorsese film Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, and was a part of Dylan’s 1978 world tour which resulted in two albums, Live At Budokan and Street Legal. 

In the 1980s David was one of the founding members of Bruce Hornsby and the Range, receiving an RIAA platinum album and a Grammy for The Way It Is. His credits read like a veritable who’s who of popular music, from the late Johnny Cash to Sting to Bobby McFerrin. 

David is also a record producer. Current projects include albums by Teddy Thompson, Jenni Muldaur, and Laura Cantrell. He is currently producing a new album by Kinky Friedman.

Musician, writer, and broadcaster Cáit O’Riordan was a founding member of London-Irish punk band The Pogues, going on to play and sing on albums including the classic Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash (one of Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time). As well as her musical work, in 2013 Cáit graduated from University College Dublin with a master’s degree in psychological science. In 2016 Cáit was designated an “Individual with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement” by the United States Government and awarded the prestigious O-1 work visa, and she has been a regular performer at the Irish Arts Centre in New York City since. In 2020 the Irish band U2 picked Cáit to be the on-air voice of their new SiriusXM channel U2 X-Radio, for which she also hosts the weekly ‘Rocky O’Riordan Show.’ In 2023 she joined the legendary New York band Bush Tetras as their new bass player and will tour with the band in North America and Europe in Fall 2023. Cáit was also selected as the 2023 Women Of Irish Arts Honoree by the Irish Arts Centre.

Warren Zanes is a New York Times bestselling author, a Grammy-nominated documentary producer, and a professor currently teaching at New York University. As a teenager, Warren Zanes joined The Del Fuegos, making three records for Slash/Warner Bros. Later, after earning his PhD in visual and cultural studies from The University of Rochester, Zanes released Memory Girls, the first of four solo recordings made for Dualtone/Nashville. In the non-profit sector, Warren was the vice president of education and public programs at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and, for ten years, an executive director of The Rock and Roll Forever Foundation. His books include Dusty in Memphis (the first volume in the celebrated 33 1/3 series); Petty: The Biography; Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records; and Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. With Garth Brooks, Zanes has worked on all six books in the artist’s anthology series. Among his work in film, Zanes was a consulting producer on the Oscar-winning Twenty Feet from Stardom, a producer on the Grammy-nominated PBS Soundbreaking series, conducted interviews for Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison: Living in the Material World, and served as writer for The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash. He is an active member of both poet Paul Muldoon’s Rogue Oliphant and a family that includes his sons, Lucian and Piero.

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. His forthcoming collection, Water, Water, will be published next month.

Steve Earle is one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters of his generation. A protege of legendary songwriters Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, he quickly became a master storyteller in his own right, with his songs being recorded by Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Emmylou Harris, The Pretenders, and countless others. 1986 saw the release of his record, Guitar Town, which shot to number one on the country charts and is now regarded as a classic of the Americana genre. Most recently, Earle’s 1988 hit Copperhead Road was made an official state song of Tennessee in 2023. 

Subsequent releases like The Revolution Starts...Now (2004), Washington Square Serenade (2007), and TOWNES (2009) received consecutive GRAMMY® Awards. His most recent album, Jerry Jeff (2022) consisted of Earle’s versions of songs written by Jerry Jeff Walker, one of his mentors. 

Earle has published both a novel I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2011) and Dog House Roses, a collection of short stories (Houghton Mifflin 2003). Earle produced albums for other artists such as Joan Baez (Day After Tomorrow) and Lucinda Williams (Car Wheels on A Gravel Road).

As an actor, Earle has appeared in several films and had recurring roles in the HBO series The Wire and Tremé. In 2009, Earle appeared in the off-Broadway play Samara, for which he also wrote a score that the New York Times described as “exquisitely subliminal.” Earle wrote music for and appeared in Coal Country, for which he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. Earle is the host of the weekly show Hard Core Troubadour on Sirius Radio’s Outlaw Country channel. 

In 2020, Earle was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2023, Steve was honored by the Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music. Steve’s forthcoming album, “Alone Again (Live)”, is set to release July 12th, 2024.

Jean Hanff Korelitz was born and raised in New York City and educated at Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge. She is the author of the novels: The Sequel (a sequel to The Plot), coming October 1st, 2024, The Latecomer (limited series adaptation forthcoming from Kristen Campo’s Campout Productions and Bruna Papandrea’s Made Up Stories), The Plot (adaptation forthcoming from Hulu, to star Mahershala Ali), You Should Have Known (Adapted for HBO as “The Undoing” by David E. Kelley, directed by Susanne Bier and starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant, and Donald Sutherland), Admission (adapted as the 2013 film of the same name, starring Tina Fey, Lily Tomlin, and Paul Rudd), The Devil and Webster, The White Rose, The Sabbathday River and A Jury of Her Peers, as well as a middle-grade reader, Interference Powder, and a collection of poetry, The Properties of Breath.

Colm is an Irish-speaking Dublin-native, living in Co. Wexford. He is a founding member of Kíla and the internationally acclaimed The Frames who have toured extensively, with countless sell-out shows all around the world. The band recently celebrated over 30 years of music and performed to 30,000 fans in Ireland. He is a prolific violinist & multi-instrumentalist composer. He won the best composer award at the Tokyo Film Festival for his score for the Irish documentary feature Steps of Freedom. His score for the feature film Róise & Frank won the 2022 Santa Barbara Audience Award. He is currently writing the score for an Irish History series called From this Small Island and is also composer in residence with an environmental organisation called ‘Hometree’ which is working to restore Ireland’s native forests. Colm writes for film, contemporary dance, and animation and has been writing music for television and theatre for over two decades. His music has also been part of David Attenborough’s Blue Planet, Sky Arts programmes, and Wild Ireland. An animated short he scored for Cartoon Saloon, Late Afternoon, was actually nominated for an Oscar and won the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Colm released his first solo instrumental Record, The Hare's Corner, in 2008 to critical acclaim. The follow up album And Now The Weather, was an Irish top Ten, he toured the record in USA, Australia, and Europe. His third release The River Holds Its Breath was recorded with Bill Whelan and they performed the album together where it was recorded in Connemara at the Clifden Arts Festival. The album was performed live in NYC and toured in Ireland to sell-out venues. He is recording his next album in Wexford. This record is inspired by his trip to Israel and Palestine in 2019 with the author Colum McCann. Colum McCann’s book Apeirogon was written about two (real) fathers on each side of the conflict who both lost a daughter. Colm’s music draws on a wide range of styles and influences ranging from classical to traditional though his music has a unique sound all of its own. He lives in rural County Wexford with his family. The landscape lends itself very well to his creative life. Colm tours as a composer with a full band and also as a solo artist.

Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh is an Irish-language poet from Kerry. Her poem Filleadh ar an gCathair was chosen as Ireland’s EU Presidency poem in 2013 and was shortlisted for RTÉ’s ‘A Poem for Ireland’. A bilingual collection, The Coast Road, was published by The Gallery Press in 2016. She received the Michael Hartnett Award in 2019 and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Prize in 2020. Her most recent collection, Tonn Teaspaigh agus Dánta Eile, received the prestigious Oireachtas Prize for Best Collection in 2022. She is an Associate Professor in Modern Irish at University College Cork

Patrick Radden Keefe is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Say Nothing, which received the National Book Critics' Circle Award and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and was named one of the 20 Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Times; Empire of Pain, which received the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction; and Rogues, a collection of his New Yorker stories. Patrick is also the creator and host of Wind of Change, an investigation into the strange convergence of Cold War espionage and heavy metal music, which the Guardian and Entertainment Weekly named the #1 podcast of 2020. An executive producer on Say Nothing, an FX limited series based on the book, will appear on Hulu later this year.

Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Pachinko was voted a New York Times "100 Best Books of the Century” by both the New York Times Book Review and by Times Readers. In 2022, Lee received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. In 2023, Lee served as the Editor of Best American Short Stories. Lee’s personal essays and literary criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Travel & Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue, and The Times of London. She is a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College. She is at work on her third novel, American Hagwon and a nonfiction work, Name Recognition.

Kevin Young is the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He previously served as the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Young is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including Stones, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; Brown; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Jelly Roll: a blues, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry; Bunk, a New York Times Notable Book, longlisted for the National Book Award and named on many “best of” lists for 2017; and The Grey Album, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. The poetry editor of the New Yorker, where he hosts the Poetry Podcast, Young is the editor of nine other volumes, most recently the acclaimed anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Society of American Historians, and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.