Muldoon's Picnic (October 2023)

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

Bill Irwin is an actor, director, writer, and clown. His original works include The Regard of Flight; Largely New York; Fool Moon; Old Hats; and The Happiness Lecture among others. His actor’s theater credits include Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Goat, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and On Beckett, an evening of passages from Samuel Beckett’s work. On television Irwin can be seen in character roles including Mr. Noodle on Elmo’s World, serial killer Nate Haskell on CSI, and psychiatrist Peter Lindstrom on Law and Order/SVU. His film credits include Rachel Getting Married, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Eight Men Out, Stepping Out, and most recently Spoiler Alert and Rustin. Irwin gratefully acknowledges the awards and fellowships that have allowed him to continue exploring work in the theater.

A teenage denizen of CBGB who fell in love with country songwriting, Amy Rigby started bands Last Roundup and the Shams in NYC’s East Village before launching a solo career with concept album Diary Of A Mod Housewife. From a Nashville publishing deal to Little Steven’s Underground Garage Coolest Song (“Dancing With Joey Ramone”) to guest spots on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, World Cafe, and Mountain Stage, Amy has never outgrown her manifesto from that 1996 debut: “She still wants to rock, and still knows how. She understands compromise, but she’s not…ready…to…give in…yet.” 

Amy tackles themes often associated with country and folk—getting by and getting older—from an ardent rock music fan’s perspective. Her passion for punk, psychedelia, garage, and good old songcraft spill out on record and across the stage. A long-time online diarist and podcaster, Rigby has contributed writing to the Village Voice, Talkhouse, and Slate. Her first book Girl To City: A Memoir was published in 2019. She lives, writes and records in Catskill, New York with her husband and sometime-bandmate Wreckless Eric, and tours regularly in the US and UK.

James Richardson is most recently the author of For Now (Copper Canyon Press, 2020).  His other books include During (winner of the Castagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of America), By the Numbers (shortlisted for the National Book Award), and Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays.  He is professor of creative writing emeritus at Princeton University.

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 alumni 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.

Simón Willson is a Chilean born, New York City based bassist, composer and improviser. As an eclectic and in-demand sideman, he has toured with a host of different musicians in Europe, the US, Canada, and South America. His wide-ranging interest in different realms of jazz, popular, and improvised music has led him to work regularly with a diverse pool of established artists such as Dave Douglas, Ethan Iverson, Jason Palmer, Jonathan Kreisberg, Pablo Held, Frank Carlberg, Roxana Amed, and the Mark Morris Dance Group, among many others. In addition to his sideman work, he co-leads the bands Family Plan and Earprint. The latter won the “best debut album” category of the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll in 2016. In 2023 Orlando Furioso, Vicente Atria’s septet in which Willson plays bass, won the Deutscher Jazz Preis in the “Best International New Artist” category. He can be heard on over thirty records for labels such as Sony Music, Tzadik, Greenleaf, Steeplechase, Newvelle, Endectomorph, as well as on a number of self-releases. His bandleading debut album “Good Company” will be released October 13, 2023 on Fresh Sound Records.

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.