New Creative Writing from UCC
Poets and short fiction writers from the UCC MA Creative Writing programmes will be presented by Leanne O’Sullivan to read from their new work. Readers include Jenni deBie, Una Ni Cheallaigh, Ciara McCarthy, Rosi Lalor and Kathy D’Arcy.
Jenni deBie is a recent graduate of Angelo State University, a tiny east Texas school she is sure no one has heard of, where she had the opportunity to present her poetry at conferences across the US. She is currently studying in Cork because if a native Texan wants to learn to be a proper poet, what better place than Ireland?
Una Ni Cheallaigh was born in Dublin. Her first collection, Salamander Crossing, was published by Lapwing, Belfast in 2011. More recent poems are in the Autumn 2015 editions of The Stony Thursday Book and Poetry Salzburg Review.
Ciara McCarthy holds a BA in Irish and English from UCC and is in her second year of the MA in Creative Writing. Her favourite book is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York is her favourite city and it is Ciara’s dream to live there some day. Her parents have encouraged her both personally and creatively throughout her life and she credits her love of literature to them both.
Rosi Lalor made her way to Cork from Liverpool via Madrid, Manchester, London, Brighton and Dublin. She made her way to poetry via all manner of trials, tribulations and observations. In 2012 she released an album of original songs called Flowers For The Living and is currently on the MA in Creative Writing programme at UCC.
Kathy D’Arcy is a poet, workshop facilitator and youth worker based in Cork city. Originally trained as a doctor she has published two collections of poetry – her most recent entitled The Wild Pupil. In 2013 she was awarded an Arts Council Literature Bursary and in 2014 an Irish Research Council Award. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at UCC.
Madelaine MacNamara
You can listen to Madelaine’s reading here.
Madelaine MacNamara grew up in France and has lived in Cork for 48 years. She has a French Arts Degree and an Irish H. Dip. Ed., and is a trained yoga teacher. She has been published in Southword, The SHOp, Crannóg, Cyphers, Riposte, Women’s Work, Poems for Lunasa and many more journals besides. Her début collection The Riddle of Waterfalls (Bradshaw Books, 2015) has been shortlisted for 2016 Shine/Strong Award for best first collection.
She was a runner-up the South Tipperary Writers Literary Competition two years running, longlisted for the 2013 Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Competition and the 2014 Fish Poetry Award. In December 2014 she won the Cork Literary Review International Poetry Competition with her manuscript The Riddle of Waterfalls, which was launched in October 2015 at the Cork City Library. She is a member of the Ballyphehane Women’s Poetry Group and Cercle d’Ecriture at the Alliance Française de Cork.
Maeve O’Sullivan
You can listen to Maeve’s reading here.
Maeve O’Sullivan works as a Journalism and Communications lecturer in further education in Dublin. Her poems and haiku have been widely published, anthologized and translated in Irish and international journals over the last twenty years. She has published three collections with Alba Publishing (UK): Initial Response (haiku, 2011), Vocal Chords (poetry, 2014) and A Train Hurtles West (haiku, 2015). Maeve is a founder member of Haiku Ireland and the Hibernian Poetry Workshop, and she also performs at festivals and other events with The Poetry Divas collective of women poets. She conducts workshops in haiku with adults and children. www.twitter.com/maeveos and www.albapublishing.com (publisher).
John MacKenna
You can listen to John’s reading here.
John MacKenna is the author of eighteen books – novels; short stories; memoir; poetry and a best-selling biography of Ernest Shackleton. He is a winner of the Irish Times, Hennessy and C Day Lewis Awards. He is currently Writer in Residence in Co. Carlow and reaches creative writing at NUI Maynooth. His most recent books are the poetry collection By the Light of Four Moons (Doire Press 2015) and the novel Joseph (New Island 2014). His collection Where Sadness Begins was published by Salmon Poetry in 2012. His adaptation for children of Ernest Shackleton’s South will be published in June (Real Reads in Britain) and his next collection of short-stories, We Sang Once Like Other Men will be published in Feb 2017 (New Island). MacKenna is the author of ten stage plays and a number of radio plays and is a frequent contributor to RTE. His play Corner Boys begins a national tour in March of this year.
Anne Marie Kennedy and Sean Ruane
You can listen to Anne Marie’s reading here.
Anne Marie Kennedy is the winner of the Molly Keane Creative Writing Award 2014. She was shortlisted for the Irish Times New Writer/Hennessy Award 2015 and long listed for Writing.ie Short Story of the Year 2015. Her prose and poetry has been published in ROPES, Blackheart Magazine, the Colony, the Manchester Review, the SHOp, Boyne Berries, the Galway Review, Irish Central and various others in Ireland and the UK. Her nonfiction essays are published in The New Hibernia Review, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA.
Anne Marie has performed at Boyle Arts Festival, Yeats Society Sligo, Inis Writers, Galway Fringe Festival, Shorelines Arts Festival, Baffle Poetry Festival, Cúirt International Festival of Literature and Electric Picnic 2015. As a freelance writer, she contributes to Sunday Miscellany on RTE Radio and Irish Music Magazine. She holds a Masters in Writing, (1st), from NUI Galway and mentors students of English & Creative Writing at NUI Galway and facilitates writing workshops.
Sean Ruane is a poet from Meath. Having first been published by David Marcus in the Phoenix Irish Short Stories collection, Sean turned to poetry. He reads regularly around the country, recently at Trinity College and at Dublin Castle. He brought his work to the 2015 Lingo Festival in Dublin and to the Fringe in Edinburgh in 2013. Sean has published his poems and short stories in a number of journals, including Kaleidotrope, Boyne Berries and most recently in The Pickled Body.
Ó Bhéal in association with Foras na Gaeilge presents
Paul Ó Colmáin
You can listen to Paul’s performance here.
Paul Ó Colmáin is a poet, musician, songwriter and visual artist living and working in West Cork, Ireland. Along with his partner Marie he manages the Working Artist Studios (WAS), a popular art centre in Skibbereen where they curate exhibitions and events, including an annual 12-hour poetry marathon. He was a winner of the inaugural Poet’s Podium, 1995 run by Samhlaíocht Chiarraí and is a regular contributor of poems in both Irish and English to many journals and anthologies. He is also an Irish language teacher and leads walking tours so that he can eat. For more about Paul visit www.paulocolmain.com
“In his poetry, Paul is known for the delicacy of his lyrics and the musicality of his lines, while his music shows his humour and tenderness, as well as his deeply romantic and questing soul.” – James Harpur
Connie Voisine
You can listen to Connie’s reading here.
Connie Voisine is the author of the forthcoming book of poems, Calle Florista, from University of Chicago Press. Her previous book, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream (2008), also published by University of Chicago Press, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her first book, Cathedral of the North (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), won the Associated Writing Program’s Award in Poetry.
She has poems published in The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Her work was featured at The Lab at Belmar, a museum show pairing prehistoric stone tools with poems.
Educated at Yale University, University of California at Irvine, and University of Utah, Voisine teaches in the creative writing program at New Mexico State University and also coordinates La Sociedad para las Artes, its outreach organization. A past fellow at Breadloaf, she is returning to Belfast, Northern Ireland for a sabbatical, where she was a Fulbright Fellow in the School of English at Queen’s University in 2012.
James Arthur
You can listen to James’ reading here.
James Arthur’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic and The American Poetry Review. He has received an Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship and a Discovery/The Nation Prize. His début is Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He lives in Baltimore and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. In 2016 he will be the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast.
Ó Bhéal in association with The Community Foundation for Ireland
and Foras na Gaeilge presents
2016 Commemoration Series (Event 2 of 8): Easter Monday
Blood on the Rose / Fuil ar an Rós – The poems of 1916
Gabriel Rosenstock, Cathal Quinn & Enda Reilly
You can listen to the entire performance here.
The CD Blood on the Rose/Fuil ar an Rós features the poetry of 1916 with music and song; with poems translated by Gabriel Rosenstock it features Gabriel, Cathal Quinn, Enda Reilly, Síle Denvir, Sadhbh Ni Fhloinn, John Blake, Oisín Mac Diarmada and was produced by Tristan Rosenstock. It has been supported by Foras na Gaeilge and UNESCO Dublin City of Literature. For Ó Bhéal, Gabriel, Cathal and Enda will be reciting and singing some of the material on the CD, plus more poems by Yeats in English and Irish, translated by Gabriel.
The evening will also feature additional readings of a variety of poems from 1916 by local poets, as well as screenings of silent footage from the era.
Gabriel Rosenstock was born c. 1949 in the barony of Cois Sléibhe in postcolonial Ireland. Author-translator of over 180 books, his latest title is Antlered Stag of Dawn, haiku in Irish, Scots, English and Japanese. (The Onslaught Press, Oxford, UK). Gabriel is a Lineage Holder of Celtic Buddhism.
Cathal Quinn is Artistic Director of Guthanna Binne Síoraí/Everlasting Voices and Mouth on Fire Theatre Company. He is Head of Voice at The Lir, Trinity College and has worked on more than twenty plays for the Gate Theatre. Cathal has brought the poetry of Beckett, Heaney and Yeats to Japan, India, Dublin and Belfast. He has directed more than twenty of Beckett’s plays and prose, five in Irish; three of Yeats’s plays and numerous works of Shakespeare. He has also adapted stories by Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and has written plays about Keats – which toured to Toronto, Edinburgh, London and St Petersburg – and World War I which played in Dublin Castle’s Chapel Royal. Film/TV work includes, notably: Charlie, Albert Nobbs, Eden, Love/Hate, Stella Days and Parked.
Enda Reilly is a singer, guitarist and songwriter from Dublin whose projects include New Songs In Irish, his Climate Change Songs Workshops, Arise and Go! a collaboration with poet Stephen James Smith. He has also written music as part of a poetic play, Everlasting Voices which has taken him to India and Japan. He has been facilitating his Climate Change Songs Workshops in schools and libraries for the last 5 years in the greater Dublin area. These are based on his songs about Climate Change and his love of science which he has never lost since getting his degree in Geology from UCD.
Enda is a former winner of the Christie Hennessy Song Competition, Comórtas Amhráin Rónán Beo @3 and has represented Ireland with songs in minority language song competitions. He has played concerts with John Spillane, Kila, Liam O Maonlai, Rónán O Snodaigh and John Prine amongst others. He has recently released his latest album, Whorls, a selection of WB Yeats’s poetry set to music. www.endareilly.com
