Curator: Nick Laird
Featuring:
Catherine Barnett
Billy Collins
Sasha Debevec-McKenney
Louis de Paor
Seán Hewitt
Ilya Kaminsky
Victoria Kennefick
Maurice Riordan
Patricia Smith
Jessica Traynor
Sound recording: Corbin Lenard, Ryan Mackstaller
Stage manager: Julia Perez
Lighting designer: Peter Lopez
Head electrician: Trevor Dewey
Stage crew: Jarod Bakum, Michael Harbeck, Corbin Lenard, Hailey O’Leary, Nicholas Santasier, Luke Woods
SCHEDULE
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2
8pm: Favorite Poems launch event: Catherine Barnett, Billy Collins, Aidan Connolly, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Rachael Gilkey, Seán Hewitt, Bill Irwin, Victoria Kennefick, Nick Laird, Melissa Navia, Consul General Helena Nolan, Cáit O'Riordan, Louis de Paor, Mary Lou Quinlan, Maurice Riordan, Patricia Smith, J. Hope Stein, and Jessica Traynor
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3
2pm: Victoria Kennefick and Sasha Debevec-McKenney
3:30pm: Seán Hewitt and Catherine Barnett
5pm: Louis de Paor and Billy Collins
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4
1pm: Jessica Traynor and Ilya Kaminsky
2:30pm: Desert Island Poems: Maurice Riordan, Patricia Smith, and Nick Laird in conversation
4pm: Maurice Riordan and Patricia Smith
5:30pm: Launch of Patrick Kavanagh: Selected Poems with Paul Muldoon
WITH OUR PARTNERS AT GLUCKSMAN IRELAND HOUSE NYU
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2
2pm: The Tom Quinlan Lecture in Poetry
Lead event partner: The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. Additional support generously provided by Culture Ireland, Tourism Ireland, Northern Ireland Bureau, and Mary Lou and Joe Quinlan.
This event is being recorded as part of a partnership with ALL ARTS Radio Hour, available on 88.3 WLIW FM, Long Island's only NPR station, wliw.org/radio or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Biographies
Nick Laird (curator) was born in County Tyrone in 1975. He is a poet, novelist, screenwriter and former lawyer, and 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, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Somerset Maugham Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is on faculty at New York University, and is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast.
Catherine Barnett is the author of three books of poetry: Human Hours, The Game of Boxes, and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. Her work has appeared in the Best American Poetry, Harper's, Kenyon Review, the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Poetry, and the Washington Post. She lives in New York City, where she is a member of the core faculty in the NYU MFA program in creative writing and a Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College. A Guggenheim fellow, she won the 2018 Believer Book Award, was a finalist for the 2019 Four Quartets Prize, and in 2022 received an Arts and Letters Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Billy Collins is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including Whale Day, The Rain in Portugal, Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, and Picnic, Lightning. Questions About Angels was selected by Edward Hirsch for the National Poetry Series. He has edited three anthologies: Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds. Collins' poetry has appeared in many periodicals including Poetry, the American Scholar, Harper's, Paris Review, and the New Yorker. His work appears regularly in the Best American Poetry. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was chosen by the New York Public Library to be a "Literary Lion." A graduate of Holy Cross College, he received his doctorate from the University of California at Riverside. He is a former Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College (CUNY). He served two terms as United States Poet Laureate (2001-2003) and as New York State Poet (2004-2006). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His Irish roots have been traced to West Cork.
Sasha Debevec-McKenney is a poet who studies the presidents. She was the 2020-2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and she received her MFA from New York University, where she was the 2018 Rona Jaffe Fellow. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Yale Review, TriQuarterly, Granta, Peach Mag, Underblong, and elsewhere. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Louis de Paor has been involved with the contemporary renaissance of poetry in Irish since 1980, when he was first published in the poetry journal Innti, which he subsequently edited for a time.
His most recent works are Obair Bhaile (LeabhairComhar, 2021) and Grá fiar/Crooked love (Bloodaxe, 2022), which includes a recording of his collaboration with Dana Lyn, One day/Lá dá raibh, a bilingual performance using poetry and music to present a day in the life of an imagined village in the West of Ireland. The recording was broadcast by Lyric FM and Raidió na Gaeltachta in 2021 and awarded a gold medal at the New York Festivals Radio Awards in 2022.
Seán Hewitt's debut collection, Tongues of Fire, was published by Jonathan Cape (2020). It won the Laurel Prize in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and the Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by the Sunday Times as one of their “30 under 30” artists in Ireland. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (July 2022), is published with Penguin Press in the USA and Jonathan Cape in the UK. He is a poetry critic for the Irish Times and teaches modern British & Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and currently lives in the United States. Most recently, he is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press), which was the finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry. Deaf Republic was named “best book of the year” by the Times (UK), Irish Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and many other publications. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Victoria Kennefick's first collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet, 2021), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, the Dalkey Emerging Writer Award, and the Seamus Heaney Prize for First Collection. It was a book of the year in the Guardian, the Irish Times, the Sunday Independent, and the White Review. An Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Artist, Victoria is also the current poet-in-residence at the Yeats Society Sligo.
Maurice Riordan’s most recent collection is Shoulder Tap, published by Faber & Faber in October 2021. Previous books include A Word from the Loki (1995), Floods (2000), The Holy Land (2007), and The Water Stealer (2013). He edited The Finest Music, an anthology of early Irish lyrics in translation, and A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science. He has received the Michael Hartnett Award, a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, and a PEN translation award. He is a former editor of Poetry Review and is emeritus professor of poetry at Sheffield Hallam University. Born in Lisgoold, Co.Cork, he lives in London, where he teaches at the Faber Academy.
Patricia Smith, winner of the 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, an LA Times Book Prize and the NAACP Image Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a National Book Award finalist. She is a Guggenheim fellow, an NEA grant recipient, a finalist for the Neudstadt Prize, a former fellow at Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo and MacDowell, and and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. Smith is currently a Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York and a visiting professor at Princeton University, as well as an instructor for Cave Canem and the Vermont College of Fine Arts' post-graduate writing program. She is currently at work on her first novel and second children’s picture book. Unshuttered, a book of dramatic monologues accompanied by 19th century photos of African-Americans, will be released by Northwestern University Press in February 2023.
Jessica Traynor was born in Dublin in 1984 and is a poet, essayist, and librettist. Her debut collection, Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award, and her second collection, The Quick (Dedalus Press, 2018), was a 2019 Irish Times poetry choice. In 2019, with actor Stephen Rea, she edited Correspondences: An Anthology to Call for an End to Direct Provision, which raised funds for MASI, the movement of asylum seekers in Ireland. A Place of Pointed Stones, a pamphlet commissioned by Offaly County Council, was published by the Salvage Press in 2021. Her third collection, Pit Lullabies, published by Bloodaxe Books this year is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Traynor has received awards including the Hennessy New Writer of the Year, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary, and the Listowel Poetry Prize. In 2016, she was named one of the “Rising Generation” of poets by Poetry Ireland. She reviews poetry for RTÉ’s Arena and for Poetry Ireland Review, and has held residencies including the Yeats Society, Sligo, and Carlow College. She is an inaugural creative fellow of UCD, where she completed her MA in creative writing in 2008, and is Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown writer-in-residence for 2021-22.
From our partners at the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation
Join us in the IAC studio for a series of short films commissioned by the Adrian Brinkherhoff Poetry Foundation, which will play from 1pm–6:30pm on Saturday and 12pm–5:30pm on Sunday.
"This is Not a Confessional Poem"
By Paula Meehan, read by Clare Dunne
"The Architectural Metaphor"
By Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, read by Venetia Bowe
"The Echo at Coole"
By Austin Clarke, read by Tommy Tiernan
"The Burdens"
Written and read by Stephen Sexton
"Our Hands Like Rain"
Written and read by Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi
"The Lake Isle of Innisfree"
By WB Yeats, read by Nithy Kasa
"Brightening"
Written and read by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
"A Pumpkin"
Written and read by Padraig Regan
Runtime: approx. 25 minutes
About Irish Arts Center
Irish Arts Center, founded in 1972 and based in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, 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.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Gerrard Boyle (Capital Project Steering Committee Chair)
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 (Chair)
John Martin
Robert J. McCann
Eileen K. Murray
Shane Naughton (Audit Committee Chair)
Sharon Patrick
James E. Quinn
Pauline Turley
STAFF
Adam Browne (Development Assistant)
Zohra Coday (Programming and Education Assistant)
Aidan Connolly (Executive Director)
Christine Cullen (Director of Administrative Operations)
Manuel Da Silva (Associate Production Manager)
Xavier Dzielski (Grants and External Engagement Coordinator)
Fiona Farrell (Communications and Marketing Associate)
Vivian Fong (Director of Communications and Marketing)
Rachael W. Gilkey (Director of Programming and Education)
Anah Klate (Audience Services Manager)
Barry Ó Séanáin (Associate Director of Development and Special Programs)
Ciara O'Shea (Communications and Marketing Assistant)
Victoria Provost (Executive Assistant to the Director)
Brian Ralston (Development Operations Manager)
Jessie Reilly (Director of Education, Family and Community Programming)
Grace Schultz (Artist Services Manager / Resident Stage Manager)
Mac Smith (Production Manager)
Pauline Turley (Vice Chair)
Dennis Walls (Director of Facility Operations)
Kestrel Wolgemuth (Associate Director of Programming)
Bryce Xingjie Chen (Staff Accountant, NCheng)
Akwesi Corinaldi (Supervising Senior Accountant, NCheng)
Taylor Panetti (Graphic Designer)
Vera Wong (Senior Accountant, NCheng)
Blake Zidell (Public Relations Consultant, Blake Zidell & Associates)
Lauren Gavin (Special Events Intern)
Lauren Mullen (Development Intern)
BOX OFFICE
Lindsey Freeman (House Manager)
Brian Magid (Box Office Associate)
Stephen Peterson (Box Office Manager)
Tylene Soto (Box Office Associate)
FRONT OF HOUSE
Aram Krikorian, Michael Lester, Anne Marie Mascia, Kevin Molica, Sylvia Morsillo, Ronan Rogers, Anne Rutter, Ritai “Ty” Su
Irish Arts Center programs are supported, in part, by government, foundation, and corporate partners including Culture Ireland, the agency for the promotion of Irish arts worldwide; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the Mayor’s Office and the New York City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; Howard Gilman Foundation; Jerome L. Greene Foundation; the Charina Endowment Fund; the Ireland Funds; the Shubert Foundation, Inc.; the Irish Institute of New York; the Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, New York; the Charles Lawrence Keith & Clara Miller Foundation; Northern Ireland Bureau; the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Consulate of Ireland in New York; British Council; Morgan Stanley; Tourism Ireland; and thousands of generous donors like you.
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