Sunday 5th July 2020
2pm - 3.30pm
A Poetry Party: Readings with our poets around the world ... with an ISL interpreter, Ray Greene
A FREE event. Booking is required for you to gain secure access to this Zoom event. You may have with you, at a social distance that applies in your country, family and friends, to enjoy listening. Some poets are ex-pat Wexfordians and Irish people, some are winners in our Anthony Cronin International Poetry Award. (ACIPA)
Margaret Galvin
Anthony Cronin International Poetry Award Judge
Margaret Galvin is a Tipperary born poet resident in Wexford for over forty years where she has worked variously with the library service, as Editor of Ireland’s Own and in Social Care. She has been publishing poetry since the mid 80’s and has a number of well regarded collections to her name, most recently, The Finer Points, a collection of poetry dealing with the experience of growing up in south Tipperary in the 60’s and 70’s. She frequently facilitates writing workshops and is especially interested in inspiring others to chronicle their story through poetry. Her work is regarded as ‘gritty and unsentimental’. (Frances Devlin-Glass, the University of Melbourne). She can be contacted at galvinmargaret88@gmail.com
James Leader
Second place, 2018 ACIPA
James Leader is an English-Luxembourgish poet, novelist and secondary school teacher of English. In 2016 he won first prize in the Luxembourg National Literature Competition with his novel “The Venus Zone”. His poem “Phoebe and the Troop Ship” was runner up in the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize (2016), his poem “Goethe in Rome” was runner-up in the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize (2018), his poem “Europe, 1945” placed second in the Anthony Cronin International Poetry Award (2018) and his poem “And then the Quail Came” was highly commended in the Moth Poetry Competition (2020). Other poems have been published in numerous anthologies in Australia, Ireland and Luxembourg. In 2020, he will represent Luxembourg with two poems in the Luxembourg pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai. He has lived in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as in the USA, Europe, and Latin America.
A.M. Cousins
Winner, 2019 ACIPA
A.M. Cousins’ poems can be found in The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times NIW, Poetry Ireland, The Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology and on the website http://www.poethead.
Eamonn Wall
Eamonn Wall is an Enniscorthy native who lives nowadays in St. Louis, Missouri, USA., though he still manages to spend parts of the year in Co. Wexford. His poetry books include Junction City: New & Selected Poems 1990-2015 and Sailing Lake Mareotis, both from Salmon Poetry. His non-fiction books are From Oven Lane to Sun Prairie: In Search of Irish America (Arlen House, 2019), Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions (Notre Dame 2011), and From the Sin-e Cafe to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish (Wisconsin). Essays and reviews have appeared in The Irish Times, The Washington Post, and other publications such as : https://press.syr.edu/supressbook-author/wall-eamonn/
Joan Morrissey
ACIPA Winner 2018
Joan Morrissey was born in Kerry, raised in Tipperary and now lives in Dublin.
She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from University College Dublin. She has won a short story competition at Listowel Writers Week and her work has been placed in The Fish, Penguin/RTE Guide and Listowel Original Essay competitions. In 2018 she won The Anthony Cronin Poetry Award at the Wexford Literary Festival.
Her work has been broadcast on RTE on a number of occasions.
She is currently working on a collection of short stories and poetry.
Ray Greene
ISL Poetry interpreter
Ray Greene became a qualified Irish Sign Language/English Interpreter in 2004. She was working as a full time Interpreter until March of this year and is now adjusting to life online! Though a native of Cork, she is now based in Wexford and works in a broad variety of settings such as education and training, employment, religious ceremonies, medical settings, theatre… and poetry sessions. The visual nature of sign language aligns itself very well to poetry and it’s very exciting when the two come together. She is delighted to be involved in this years Wexford Literary Festival!
Nicola Anthony
Nicola’s art work can be seen on the Cáca Milis Cabaret event on Saturday 4th July. From her work on the effects of immigration, she was moved to write a poem from this research. The story behind her art and poem can be seen on : https://youtu.be/m5-
She will join us to read her poem. Her poem can be read here in advance:https://nicolaanthony.co.
4pm - 5.30pm
Colum McCann in Conversation with Peter Murphy with guests Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin
Join us for in conversation via Zoom to hear international award winning author Colum McCann discuss his best-selling novel Apeirogon with author Peter Murphy (John the Revelator, Shall we Gather at the River).
Rami Elhanan from Israel and Bassam Aramin from Palestine, the fathers who lost their daughters due to conflict between Israel and Palestine, will join in our Zoom event with Colum McCann.
Colum McCann is the author of seven novels and three collections of stories. From Dublin, Ireland, he has been the recipient of many honours, including the National Book Award, the International Dublin Impac Prize, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, election to the Irish arts academy, several European awards, an Oscar nomination and more. In 2017 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts. His work has been published in over 40 languages.
He is the co-founder of the non-profit global story exchange organisation, Narrative 4, and he teaches at the MFA program in Hunter College. He lives in New York with his wife, Allison, and their family. His best-selling and award winning books include Transatlantic, Let the great World Spin, Zoli and This Side of Brightness.
His most recent bestselling and internationally acclaimed book Apeirogon which has been referred to as a ‘beautifully observed masterpiece’ (The Guardian) is based on an uplifting true story. It’s about two fathers — Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian — who each lost a young daughter to senseless violence. They have become friends and work together, through an organization called Combatants for Peace, to bring the opposing sides together. Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners has tapped Luke Davies (Lion, Candy, Beautiful Boy, Catch – 22, News of the World) to write the script for the movie adaption. www.colummccann.com
Their paths crossed at a Combatants for Peace gathering, an Israeli-Palestinian movement of ex-fighters committed to non-violence. Rami’s daughter, Smadar, had been killed in a suicide bombing attack in the late 1990s on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street. A decade later, Bassam faced the same devastation. In 2007, his ten-year-old daughter, Abir, was killed by an Israeli rubber bullet near her school.
Peter Murphy is a writer and spoken-word performer from Wexford, Ireland. He is the author of two novels, John the Revelator (2009) and Shall We Gather at the River (2013), published by Faber & Faber in Ireland and the UK, and by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the US and Canada. John the Revelator was translated into Italian and published as John il Visionario by Fazi Editore in 21011. He has also been translated and published in France, the Czech Republic, Holland, Germany, Serbia, Romania and the Commonwealth countries. Peter’s short fiction ‘The Downtown Queen’ was published in Being Various: New Irish Short Stories, edited by Lucy Caldwell, (Faber, April 2019); ‘The Dead’ was included in Dubliners 100 (Tramp Press, 2014), and ‘The Blacklight Ballroom’ appeared in New Irish Short Stories edited by Joseph O’Connor (Faber & Faber, 2011). He also co-wrote radio drama Coma with Kevin McCann, broadcast on Newstalk, November 2014.
Peter’s journalism and non-fiction has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, the Irish Times, Hot Press and Huffington Post. He is a regular guest on RTE Radio 1’s arts review show Arena. He currently performs live under the name Cursed Murphy. ‘Climb’, the fourth single from Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance is out now. The band have previously released the singles Foxhole Prayer, The Bells of Hell, and This Cursed Earth. Their debut album will be out at the end of the year, with live dates planned as soon as Covid-19 restrictions are lifted. Peter is also the presenter of Cursed Murphy’s podcasts.
Peter served as writer-in-residence at Carlow College, and curated Cursed Murphy’s Laboratory, a hugely successful series of interdisciplinary arts events. He is currently completing his third book.
Colm Mac Con Iomaire is a Violinist and Composer from Dublin Ireland. He’s a founder member of two well known Irish bands Kíla & The Frames. He has travelled the world for the past two decades playing music. Colm has released three instrumental albums of his own – ‘The Hare’s Corner’ 2008, ‘And Now the Weather’ 2015 and 2019’s ‘The River Holds its Breath’ which was produced by Bill Whelan. Colm recently scored the soundtrack to Cartoon Saloon’s Oscar nominated Animated Short ‘Late Afternoon’. Other projects include working with Poets, Actors and Dancers weaving tunes and melody around their work.
Colm will play a piece he was inspired to write when on a non-profit global exchange group Narrative 4 trip to the Aida refugee camp on the border of Israel/Palestine with Colum McCann. Colm is also a Wexford County resident. Read more by clicking here.
The photo is courtesy and copyright of Rich Gilligan.