10th Annual PoetryFest

Ciaran Carson has published some two dozen books of poetry, prose and translation, most recently From Elsewhere, translations from the work of the French poet Jean Follain, paired with poems inspired by the translations (Gallery Press 2014, Wake Forest University Press 2015).  His work has won many prizes including the T. S. Eliot Award and the Forward Prize. In 2011 he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by University College Dublin. He is a member of Aosdána, the affiliation of Irish artists, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow, and has been awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, and a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program and splits her time between the East Coast and Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she works to revitalize the Mojave language.

She is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. 

Photo credit: Cybele Knowles

Vona Groarke is an Irish poet who has published ten books with Gallery Press, the latest being Selected Poems (winner of the 2017 Pigott Prize for the best collection of poetry by an Irish poet), and a 2016 book-length personal essay on art frames, Four Sides Full. A new collection, Double Negative, is due in 2019. She teaches poetry at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and, this winter, is a Cullman Fellow at the NYPL.

Marie Howe is the author of four volumes of poetry: Magdalene: Poems (W.W. Norton, 2017), The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W.W. Norton, 2009), What the Living Do (1997), and The Good Thief (1988). She is also the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and the Partisan Review, among others.

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's been shortlisted for the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize, and is currently a writer-in-residence at New York University.

Ben Lerner has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, among other honors. He is the author of two novels (10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station), three books of poetry (The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path), and a work of criticism (The Hatred of Poetry). Recent collaborations with artists include Blossom with Thomas Demand, The Polish Rider with Anna Ostoya, and The Snows of Venice with Alexander Kluge.

Poet, critic, educator, and divagator Maureen N. McLane grew up in upstate New York and was educated at Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. She is the author of five books of poetry, including This Blue (FSG, 2014), a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry, and most recently Mz N: the serial (FSG, 2016) and Some Say (FSG, 2017), finalist for the Audre Lorde/Publishing Triangle Award and the Believer Award. Her book My Poets (FSG, 2012), an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism, was named a New York Times Notable Book and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin is a poet from Northwest Donegal, Ireland. Her debut collection Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017) was shortlisted for the Shine Strong Award for best first collection in Ireland and for the 2018 Julie Suk Award in the U.S.A. She is the author of a suite of poems about Dublin titled Town (The Salvage Press, 2018) and a recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award on behalf of the Arts Council of Ireland. Ní Churreáin was the 2017-18 Kerry Writer-In-Residence and is the 2018-19 John Broderick Writer-In-Residence for Westmeath. She has been awarded literary fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Jack Kerouac House Orlando, and Hawthornden Castle Scotland.

Michelle O’Sullivan was born in Chicago and grew up in Co. Sligo. She lives in Co. Mayo and works freelance in the education sector. Her first collection, The Blue End of Stars (The Gallery Press), was published in 2012, shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, it won the Strong/Shine Poetry Award. Her second collection, The Flower and the Frozen Sea (The Gallery Press, 2015) is A Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her newest collection is This One High Field (The Gallery Press, October 2018).  

Photo Credit: Suella Holland

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.

Billy Ramsell was born in Cork in 1977 and educated at the North Monastery and UCC. He has published two collections with Dedalus Press, Complicated Pleasures in 2007 and The Architect’s Dream of Winter in 2013, which was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and was recently published in Italian translation.

He was awarded the Chair of Ireland Bursary for 2013 and the Poetry Ireland Residency Bursary for 2015. He has been invited to read his work at many festivals and literary events around the world. He lives in Cork where he co-runs an educational publishing company. 

Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors include a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, Cave Canem, MacDowell Colony and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming to Best American Poetry 2018, The New Yorker, The New York Times and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the executive director at Cave Canem Foundation and the 2018-2019 Doris Lippman Visiting Poet at The City College of New York.

Photo Credit: Eliza Griffiths