9th Annual PoetryFest

Tara Bergin was born and grew up in Dublin, and now lives in the north of England. Her second collection of poetry, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx, was published by Carcanet in 2017 and shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection. Tara lectures parttime at Newcastle University.

Billy Collins has published 10 collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, Sailing Alone around the Room, Nine Horses, The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems, Ballistics, Horoscopes for the Dead and Picnic, and Lightning. He has edited two anthologies, Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. His two most recent books, Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems 2003 – 2013 and The Rain in Portugal, are New York Times bestsellers. Collins has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He served as United States Poet Laureate (2001-03) and New York State Poet (2004-06). He was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Photo credit: Bill Hayes

Adam Crothers was born in Belfast in 1984, and works in a library in Cambridge. His first collection, Several Deer, was published by Carcanet in 2016, and won the 2017 Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. He has appeared in the anthologies New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015) and The Future Always Makes Me So Thirsty: New Poets from the North of Ireland (Blackstaff, 2016), and in 2016 he was selected as one of Poetry Ireland Review's 'Rising Generation' poets.

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 of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Photo credit: Victoria Smith

Born in County Tyrone in 1975, Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, and lawyer. His poetry collections, published by Faber and Faber, are To A Fault (2005), On Purpose (2007), and Go Giants (2013). A new collection, Glitch, is forthcoming in 2018. His novels are Utterly Monkey (2005), Glover’s Mistake (2009), and Modern Gods (2017). Awards for his writing include the Betty Trask Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award, the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is currently a writer-in-residence at New York University.

Alice Lyons, a poet and cross-disciplinary artist, was born in Paterson, NJ and has lived in Roscommon and Sligo since 1998. Her third collection of poetry is The Breadbasket of Europe (Veer Books, London, 2016). Lyons’s poems have appeared in publications such as Tygodnik Powszcheny (Kraków) and Poetry (Chicago), and in film, public art and gallery contexts. Among the honors she has received are a Radcliffe Fellowship in Poetry & New Media, Harvard University; the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry; the inaugural Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary from Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill; and an IFTA (Irish Film and Television Award) nomination for The Polish Language, a poetry film she co-directed with animator Orla Mc Hardy.

Photo credit: Hazel Walker

Sally Wen Mao is the author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). Her second book, Oculus, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2019. Her work has won a 2017 Pushcart Prize and is published or forthcoming in A Public Space, Poetry, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, The Missouri Review, Tin House, The Best of the Net 2014 and The Best American Poetry 2013, among others. The recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, the New York Public Library Cullman Center, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Mao holds an M.F.A. from Cornell University. She is the 2017-2018 Jenny McKean Writer in Washington at the George Washington University.

Iggy McGovern is Fellow Emeritus in the School of Physics at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of two collections of poetry with Dedalus Press, The King of Suburbia (2005) and Safe House (2010), as well as a poetic biography of the 19th century mathematician and poet William Rowan Hamilton, A Mystic Dream of 4 (Quaternia Press, 2013). He also edited the anthology 2012: Twenty Irish Poets Respond to Science in Twelve Lines. McGovern has received many awards, including the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award for Poetry and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary. A new collection, The Eyes of Isaac Newton, is due from Dedalus Press in October 2017.

Sinéad Morrissey was born in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She has published six collections of poetry and her awards include the Patrick Kavanagh Award, first prize in the UK National Poetry Competition, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She has won the Irish Times Poetry Now award twice and her 2013 collection, Parallax, was also the recipient of the T.S. Eliot Prize. Parallax and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) was shortlisted for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Poetry and in 2016 she received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has served as Belfast's inaugural Poet Laureate and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Born in Cork, Eilean Ní Chuilleanáin was awarded the prestigious position of the Ireland Professor of Poetry 2016, which she will serve until 2019. She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Acts and Monuments (1966), which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award; The Magdalene Sermon (1989); The Girl Who Married a Reindeer (2001); Selected Poems (2009); and The Sun-fish (2010), which won the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Her most recent volume, The Boys of Bluehill (2015), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. She translated two books by the Romanian poet Ileana Malancioiu, After the Raising of Lazarus (2005) and The Legend of the Walled-Up Wife (2012), as well as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s The Water Horse (2001), co-translated with Medbh McGuckian.

Caitríona O’Reilly was born in Wicklow and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where she completed a Ph.D. in American Literature. She has published three full collections of poetry with Bloodaxe Books. The Nowhere Birds (2001) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was awarded the Rooney Prize in Irish Literature; The Sea Cabinet (2006), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Geis (2015) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and is jointly published by Bloodaxe Books and Wake Forest University Press. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Pigott Prize and was the winner of the 2016 Irish Times Poetry Now Prize. Caitríona O’Reilly also writes literary criticism and has published some short fiction. She lives in Lincolnshire, UK.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is recipient of a 2015 Guggenhiem Fellowship. He is the author of Heaven, which was longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award, and The Ground: Poems, for which he received a 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award, the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the 2013 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Granta, and many other publications, and he has written about soccer and basketball for The Paris Review. The author of the influential critical volume When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, Philips is also the translator of Salvador Espriu’s story collection Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth as well as numerous other works from Catalan, Spanish, and Italian.

Photo credit: Sue Kwon

Katie Raissian is editor and publisher of Stonecutter Journal, a print magazine of art and literature which focuses on publishing international writers and artists alongside US-based ones. She is also an editor at Grove Atlantic where she edits literary fiction and nonfiction.