Ó Bhéal in association with Cork Harbour Festival presents
Daniel Wade
You can listen to Daniel’s reading here.
Ó Bhéal’s guest for the 2018 Cork Harbour Festival is Daniel Wade, a poet and playwright from Dublin who is fascinated with the sea. In January 2017, his play The Collector opened the 20th anniversary season of the New Theatre, Dublin. His spoken word album Embers and Earth, available for download on iTunes and Spotify, launched the previous October at the National Concert Hall. A prolific performer, Daniel has featured in festivals including Electric Picnic, Body and Soul, Culture Night and the West Belfast Festival. Daniel was the Hennessy New Irish Writing winner for April 2015 in The Irish Times, and his poetry has appeared in over two dozen publications since 2012.
Deeply fascinated with the sea, Daniel’s poetry interrogates themes of voyaging, homecoming and the urgent role played by the ocean in much of Ireland’s historical and contemporary struggles, as well as the far-ranging legacies of exploration, boat-building, shipwreck and rescue operations. Many of Daniel’s poems are featured in a monthly column entitled ‘Poems from the Coast,’ which was written in conjunction with Coast Monkey, Ireland’s premier maritime and coastal heritage website.
Carlos Reyes
You can listen to Carlos’s reading here.
Poet and translator Carlos Reyes has been visiting and staying in Ireland since 1972. Until recently he maintained a three hundred year old cottage in Letterkelly, Miltown-Malbay. When not traveling he now makes his home in Portland, Oregon.
He has published ten volumes of poetry, Along the Flaggy Shore, Poems from West Clare (Salmon Poetry, 2018) is the latest. His canon also includes many volumes of translations and one prose book, Keys to the Cottage, Stories from the West of Ireland (Lost Horse Press, 2015). Last year saw the publication of Guilt in Our Pockets, Poems from South India (Lynx House Press, 2017). He has been the recipient of a Heinrich Boll Fellowship (Achill Island, Ireland) and fellowships from Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, N.Y.), the Fundación Valparaíso (Mojácar, Spain), and The Island Institute (Sitka, Alaska).
For 40 years he edited Trask House Books, Inc., a poetry press. He is a founding editor of Hubbub, a poetry magazine, and was on the editorial staff of Ar Mhuin na Muice (On a Pig’s Back), an Irish literary journal.
Ó Bhéal in association with the Heritage Council presents
Make a Connection (Event 1 of 6)
Nithy Kasa and Ciara Ní É
You can watch seven videos of Nithy and Ciara’s performances here.
For the European Year of Cultural Heritage (EYCH), Ó Bhéal presents a series of paired readings featuring established Irish or European poets with poets who have migrated to Ireland.
Nithy Kasa was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, she now resides in Dublin. Her work was first published in the Anthology Embers Of Words. Recently, she featured in A New Ulster, the SAH journal and the Poetry Programme Christmas show. Nithy has also participated in numerous public speaking around the country, with venues including the NUI Galway and the Royal Irish Academy. She is a member of the Dublin Writers’ Forum.
Dubliner Ciara Ní É (sounds like KNEE YAY) studied English and Irish in Trinity College and writes in both languages. She has been published in a variety of journals including Icarus and Comhar, and was chosen for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series, and also for Foras na Gaeilge’s mentorship scheme. Ciara is the founder of REIC, a bilingual spoken word and open mic night that features poetry, music, storytelling and rap. Ciara has just returned from a year in Philadelphia, where she was teaching Irish in Villanova University as a Fulbright FLTA.
Is Bleácliathach í Ciara Ní É a scríobhann sa dá theanga ina mhaireann sí. Is í a bhunaigh an oíche mic oscailte, REIC. Foilsíodh saothar dá chuid in irisí éagsúla, Icarus agus Comhar ina measc. Anuraidh roghnaíodh í don scéim Introductions de chuid Poetry Ireland, agus Scéim Meantóireachta Fhoras na Gaeilge. Tá sí díreach fillte ó Philadelphia, áit a raibh sí ina cónaí le bliain anuas agus í ag múineadh Gaeilge in Villanova University.
#EuropeForCulture #EYCH #BliainNaGaeilge
Greg Delanty
You can listen to Greg’s reading here.
Photo By John Minihan
Greg Delanty’s selected poems (available now) is titled Selected Delanty (Un-Gyve Press, 2017). His latest book of poems is The Greek Anthology, Book XVII (Carcanet Press, 2012; retitled Book Seventeen, LSU Press). Other recent books are The Word Exchange – Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (W.W. Norton, 2012) and his Collected Poems 1986-2006 (Carcanet Press, 2007).
Delanty has received many awards, most recently a Guggenheim for poetry. He is Poet in Residence at Saint Michael’s College, Vermont and a US citizen as well as an Irish citizen. He is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers.
‘Delanty writes poems that are wordily appealing in the way that Hopkins and late Auden appeal.’
‘There is real originality of technique controlling the strong emotional currents [in his poems].’
Nathanael O’Reilly and Anne Casey
You can listen to Nathanael’s reading here.
Nathanael O’Reilly was born and raised in Australia. He has travelled on five continents and spent extended periods in England, Ireland, Germany, Ukraine and the United States, where he currently resides. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in ten countries, including Antipodes, Australian Love Poems, Cordite, FourW, Glasgow Review of Books, Mascara, Postcolonial Text, Snorkel, Tincture, Transnational Literature, Verity La and The Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2017.
O’Reilly is the recipient of an Emerging Writers Grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. He is the author of Preparations for Departure (UWAP Poetry, 2017), named one of the “2017 Books of the Year” in Australian Book Review; Distance (Picaro Press, 2014; Ginninderra Press, 2015); and the chapbooks Cult (Ginninderra Press, 2016), Suburban Exile (Picaro Press, 2011) and Symptoms of Homesickness (Picaro Press, 2010). He was the writer-in-residence at Booranga Writers’ Centre in May 2017.
Originally from west Clare, Anne Casey is an award-winning poet and writer living in Sydney, Australia. Over a 25-year career, she has worked as a business journalist, feature writer, magazine editor, media communications director and legal author. Anne is poetry editor for Other Terrain and Backstory literary journals (Swinburne University, Melbourne). Her writing and poetry rank as ‘Most-Read’ in The Irish Times. She is author of the recently published where the lost things go (Salmon Poetry 2017).
Anne’s poems have been published internationally in newspapers, magazines, journals, anthologies, videos, music albums, podcasts, broadcasts, an international art exhibition and a stage show. She has won or been shortlisted for numerous competitions including the Glen Phillips Novice Writer Award 2017 (Australia), Cúirt International Poetry Prize (Ireland, 2017), Eyewear Books Poetry Prize (UK, 2017) and the Bangor Annual Poetry Competition (Northern Ireland, 2016). A collection of 20 pieces of Anne’s poetry focused on the treatment of children (including many from Irish Famine-affected families) in 1800’s colonial Australia was commissioned as a voiceover and visual art. This was featured in the Stitched Up international art exhibition in Newcastle, Australia in July-August 2017 and was subsequently published by Swinburne University in Melbourne.
Ó Bhéal in association with the Heritage Council presents
Make a Connection (Event 2 of 6)
Nyaradzo Masunda and Eva Bourke
For the European Year of Cultural Heritage (EYCH), Ó Bhéal presents a series of paired readings featuring established Irish or European poets with poets who have migrated to Ireland.
Nyaradzo Masunda was born in Gutu district of Zimbabwe in 1972, the youngest of three children. Her father was a school teacher turned politician. Her mother was also a school teacher who gave up her job to join her husband after he was politically banned from teaching. Her father died when she was five months old. She was brought up by her mother who herself aspired to be a writer. Nyaradzo went on to study Accountancy however she kept her love for poetry. Nyaradzo came to Ireland to join her husband working in Cork. Her poetry was recently published in the anthology Landing Places – Immigrant Poets in Ireland (Dedalus Press, 2010) and in The Stony Thursday Book. She has read her poetry on RTÉ Radio’s Arena programme, at Cork’s Sound Eye Poetry Festival and at Irish Aid’s Africa Day Celebration.
Eva Bourke is a poet and translator. She is originally from Germany and came to live and work in Ireland in her twenties. She has published seven collections of poetry, the most recent being In Seeing Yellow (Dedalus 2018). She has published several anthologies and collections of poetry in translation both in English and German, has edited together with Borbála Faragó an anthology entitled Landing Places – Immigrant Poets in Ireland (Dedalus 2010) and she co-edited with Vincent Woods, fermata: Writings inspired by Music (Artisan House, 2016). Her work has been widely translated and has received numerous awards and bursaries. She is a member of Aosdána.
#EuropeForCulture #EYCH
Leah Umansky
You can listen to Leah’s reading here.
Leah Umansky lives in New York City and is the author of The Barbarous Century (Eyewear Publishing, 2018), Domestic Uncertainties (Blazevox 2012) and two chapbooks, the dystopian themed Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016) and the Mad Men inspired Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press 2014). A graduate of the MFA program in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, she is also the curator and host of The COUPLET Reading Series in New York City.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Poetry Magazine, Magma, Barrow Street, Salamander, Pleiades, and Plume, as well as in the anthologies The Golden Shovel Anthology, Misrespresented Peoples (NYQ Books, 2018) and The Eloquent Poem (Persea Books, 2019). Some of her Game of Thrones inspired poems have been translated into Norwegian and Bengali.
David Starkey, Paul Willis and Chryss Yost
You can listen to David’s reading here.
David Starkey directs the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College, where he is Professor of English. He has published seven full-length collections of poetry, most recently It Must Be Like the World (Pecan Grove, 2011), Circus Maximus (Biblioasis, 2013) and Like a Soprano (Serving House, 2014), an episode-by-episode revisioning of The Sopranos TV series. In addition, over the past twenty-eight years he has published more than 400 poems in literary journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, American Scholar, Antioch Review, Barrow Street, Georgia Review, Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Southern Poetry Review. Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford/St. Martin’s) will soon be in its third edition and is currently one of the best-selling creative writing textbooks in North America.
Reviewing Starkey’s work in The Georgia Review, Paul Zimmer praised his “wonderful language” and “amazing lines,” concluding, “Starkey is an entertaining and resourceful poet.” David Kirby wrote that “the great philosophers weave in and out of these poems, hand in hand with the great criminals, and David Starkey is a step behind them, missing nothing.” And Eloise Klein Healy found Starkey’s poems to be “awash with reports from the senses and in full-throated song about it all. Wise, witty, and wide-ranging, this is poetry that will reward the reader with the kind of delight one feels in the face of masterwork.”
Paul Willis is a professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, where he has taught creative writing and British Renaissance literature since 1988. With David Starkey, he edited the anthology In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (University of Iowa Press, 2005). His work in creative nonfiction is Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild (WordFarm, 2005), and his three full collections of poems are Visiting Home (Pecan Grove Press, 2008), Rosing from the Dead (WordFarm, 2009), and Say This Prayer into the Past (Cascade Books, 2013). He is also the author of an eco-fantasy quartet, The Alpine Tales (WordFarm, 2010), portions of which were previously published as separate novels by Avon Books.
Willis’s poems and essays have appeared in well over a hundred journals, including Poetry, Image, and Wilderness, and have also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 1996 (Scribner’s), The Best Spiritual Writing 1999 (HarperSanFrancisco), The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004 (Houghton Mifflin), and The Best Christian Writing 2006 (Jossey-Bass). More recently his poems have been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. His poetry chapbook The Deep and Secret Color of Ice was selected for the Small Press Poetry Prize in 2002 by Jane Hirshfield, who said of his work, “Paul Willis’s poems give off a multifaceted, sharp-edged beauty, akin to the light that sometimes glints from the edges of leaves after rain. They look to the places where unexpected treasures lie quietly hidden—a childhood illness, a set of old wooden bleachers, a Sierra Juniper’s berries—and bring that treasure richly forward, into a mature, and maturing wisdom.”
Chryss Yost is a lifelong Californian who has lived in Santa Barbara since 1990. She attended Santa Barbara City College as a re-entry student before transferring to UCSB, where she majored in English and minored in professional writing and is currently completing a Ph.D. in Education. She has received awards for her business writing, fiction, and poetry. Her poems have been set to music and she is a frequent collaborator with artists and galleries: she has written poems on request for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the County Arts Commission, the Museum of Natural History, and Sullivan Goss Gallery. Her poem “Furious Bread” was selected for the 2014 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award by Patricia Smith.
Since publishing her first poems in a national journal in 1997, Yost has published two fine-press chapbooks and has co-edited major poetry anthologies, including California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (co-edited with California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia and Jack Hicks). While serving as Poet Laureate, her first full-length book, Mouth & Fruit, was published by Gunpowder Press. She has since become a co-editor at the press, which is named to honor Barbara of Nicomedia, patron saint of gunpowder. California poet laureate Al Young wrote: Mouth & Fruit—what a hearty debut! If ever there lived a hands-on poet, her name is Chryss Yost. Wired with feeling and touch, reverie and thought, anger and hunger, these sleek poems dart, dive, sizzle, and sometimes sting.” And Colorado poet laureate Dave Mason said, “Chryss Yost’s poems are like the coastal light of California, so brightly made you almost miss the grief between the lines. This is poetry of warm intelligence, sensuality and grace.”
Ó Bhéal in association with Cork Pride festival presents
Mary Dorcey
You can listen to Mary’s reading here.
Mary Dorcey is a critically acclaimed Irish poet, short story writer and novelist. The first Irish woman in history to advocate for LGBT rights, Dorcey is a lifelong activist for gay and women’s rights. Founder member of ‘Irish Women United,’ ‘The Sexual Liberation Movement,’ and ‘Women for Radical Change.’ Her poetry is taught in schools at O-Level in Britain and on the Irish Junior Certificate. She has lived in England, the USA, France, Japan, Italy and Spain.
She has published eight previous books: Kindling (Onlywomen Press, 1982); A Noise from the Woodshed (Onlywomen Press, 1987); Moving into the Space Cleared by our Mothers (Salmon Poetry, 1991); Scarlet O’Hara (Onlywomen Press, 1993); The River that Carries me (Salmon Poetry, 1995); Biography of Desire (Poolbeg, 1997); Like Joy in Season, like Sorrow (Salmon Poetry, 2001); and Perhaps the Heart is Constant after All (Salmon Poetry, 2012).
Dorcey won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1990 for her short story collection A Noise from the Woodshed. Her poetry and fiction is researched and taught internationally at universities throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. The subject of countless academic critiques and theses, it has been anthologised in more than one hundred collections. She is a member of Aosdána, the Irish Academy of Writers and Artists and is a Research Associate at Trinity College where for many years she led seminars at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies. She is currently completing a collection of novellas: The Good Father. She lives in Wicklow, Ireland.
