Curators: Vona Groarke and Nick Laird

Featuring:
Nuar Alsadir
Henri Cole
Leontia Flynn
Ishion Hutchinson
​John Kelly
Fran Lock
Shane McCrae
Maggie Millner
Declan Ryan

SCHEDULE

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22

8pm: Favorite Poems launch event // Featuring Dael Orlandersmith, Heather Clark, John Duddy, Consul General Helena Nolan, Isabella Hammad, Vona Groarke, and more.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23

2pm: Declan Ryan and Maggie Millner
3:30pm: Nuar Alsadir and Fran Lock
5pm: Leontia Flynn and Henri Cole

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24

1pm: John Kelly and Ishion Hutchinson
2:30pm: Desert Island Poems // Shane McCrae and Vona Groarke in conversation with Nick Laird
4pm: Shane McCrae and Vona Groarke
Including the premiere of two new poetry films created by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation 

Lead event partner: The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. Presented with generous support from Culture Ireland, Northern Ireland Bureau, and Tourism Ireland.

Biographies

Vona Groarke has published thirteen books with Gallery Books, Ireland's foremost poetry publisher, including Woman of Winter (2023), and Link: Poet and World (2021). Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara, a poetic account of Irish women domestic servants in 1890s New York (which arose out of her time as a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library 2018–19), was published by New York University Press in 2022. She is the current writer in residence at St John's College, Cambridge, in the U.K.

Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, and former lawyer. He has published four poetry collections: To A Fault, On Purpose, Go Giants, and Feel Free, as well as three novels: Utterly Monkey, Glover’s Mistake, and Modern Gods. Awards for his writing include the Betty Trask Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is on the faculty at New York University and is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast.

Nuar Alsadir's most recent book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf Press/Fitzcarraldo Editions), was a TIME magazine must-read of 2022 and a Publisher's Weekly best book of 2022. She is also the author of two poetry collections: Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and More Shadow Than Bird. She is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and a member of the curatorial board of The Racial Imaginary Institute. She works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan to a French mother and an American father. He has published eleven collections of poetry and received many awards, including the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published Orphic Paris, a memoir. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

Ishion Hutchinson is the author of the poetry collections School of Instructions, House of Lords and Commons, and Far District. His awards include the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, Hutchinson is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University.

John Kelly is from Enniskillen in County Fermanagh. His first poetry collection Notions, was published in 2018 by Dedalus Press. A second collection Space, was published in 2022. His work has appeared in numerous publications including the Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, Oxford Magazine, and several anthologies. His poem "Winter’s Blessing" features on the 2024 Grammy-winning box set For The Birds: The Birdsong Project. His novel, From Out of the City, was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year at the 2014 Irish Book Awards. A radio play, The Pipes, starring Barry McGovern with music by Liam O’Flynn was broadcast on RTÉ. He lives in Dublin.

Fran Lock is the author of thirteen poetry collections, most recently Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, 2023), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023, and a disgusting lie: further adventures through the neoliberal hell-mouth (Pamenar Press, 2023). White/Other (87 Press, 2022), a collection of hybrid lyric riffs, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Vulgar Errors/Feral Subjects, a collection of essays, was published by Out-Spoken Press last year. Fran is a commissioning editor and maid of all work at the radical arts and culture cooperative Culture Matters, where she edited the mammoth anthology The Cry of the Poor (2021) and launched the Culture Matters pamphlet series in 2023. She is a member of the new Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and she edits the "Soul Food" column for Communist Review. 

Shane McCrae’s most recent books of poetry are Cain Named the Animal, a finalist for the Forward Prize and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award, and The Many Hundreds of the Scent. His memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, was published in 2023. Also in 2023, he was awarded the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, his other awards include a Lannan Literary Award and a Whiting Writer's Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Maggie Millner's work has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, and Kenyon Review among other publications. She is a lecturer at Yale and a senior editor at the Yale Review. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Declan Ryan was born in Mayo and lives in London. His first collection, Crisis Actor, is published in the UK by Faber & Faber and in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. His reviews and essays have appeared in journals including the New York Review of Books, The Baffler, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Poetry, the Irish Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Boxing News.

About Irish Arts Center

Founded in 1972 and based in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, Irish Arts Center is a home for artists and audiences of all backgrounds who share a passion or appreciation for the evolving arts and culture of contemporary Ireland and Irish America. We present, develop, and celebrate work from established and emerging artists and cultural practitioners, providing audiences with emotionally and intellectually engaging experiences in an environment of Irish hospitality. Steeped in grassroots traditions, we also provide community education programs and access to the arts for people of all ages and ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds. In a historic partnership of the people of Ireland and New York, Irish Arts Center recently completed construction on a fully-funded $60MM state-of-the-art new facility to support this mission for the 21st century.

Irish Arts Center Staff

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Gerrard Boyle 
Andrew Breslin
Aidan Connolly
Kristine Covillo
John S. Daly
Robert M. Devlin
Celestine Donaghy
John Duffy
Kathleen Fee
Russell Gioiella
Loretta Brennan Glucksman
Shaun Kelly 
John Martin
Robert J. McCann
Shane Naughton
Sharon Patrick
James E. Quinn
Pauline Turley

STAFF 

Elise Bargman (Ticketing and Marketing Data Manager)
Zohra Coday (Programming and Education Associate)
Aidan Connolly (Executive Director)
Manuel Da Silva (Production Manager and Lighting Supervisor)
Shannon Ducey (Administrative Manager)
Fiona Farrell (Communications and Marketing Associate)
Vivian Fong (Director of Communications and Marketing)
Rachael W. Gilkey (Director of Programming and Education)
Laney Granito (Special Events Coordinator)
Jon Harper (Chief Operating Officer)
Anah Klate (Audience Services Manager)
Andy O'Reilly (Artist Services Manager)
Barry Ó Séanáin (Director of Development)
Ciara O'Shea (Communications and Marketing Associate)
Emma Reifschneider (Executive Assistant)
Jessie Reilly (Director of Education, Family and Community Programming)
Thomas Short (Stage Supervisor)
Mac Smith (Director of Production)
Pauline Turley (Vice Chair)
Dennis Walls (Director of Facility Operations)
Kestrel Wolgemuth (Associate Director of Programming)

Tehmina Anjum (Senior Accountant, NCheng)
Desaann Legzim (Senior Accountant, NCheng)
Wenbin Nie (Supervising Senior, NCheng)
Vera Wong (Senior Accountant, NCheng)

Pat Morin (Graphic Designer)
Taylor Panetti (Graphic Designer)

Blake Zidell (Public Relations Consultant, Blake Zidell & Associates) 

Sarah Iles (Special Events Intern)
Cynthia Leung (Development Intern)
Maya Ryan (Communications and Marketing Intern)
Sarah Shanahan (Development Intern)
Matt Storti (Programming Intern)