12 female poets feature in Cork city's Poetry in the Park
Patricia Looney, Cork City Libraries. Picture: Michael O'Sullivan /OSM PHOTO
POETRY in the Park, a collaboration between Cork City Libraries and Cork City Council Parks Section, is back again this year.
Audrey Molloy is an Irish poet living in Sydney. Her debut collection, The Important Things (The Gallery Press, 2021), won the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize.
Bobbie Sparrow recently published her debut poetry collection, The Weight of Blood with Yaffle press. She is a widely published poet with poems in journals and anthologies. Her work has been placed in several well-known competitions. She lives in rural Galway, loves swimming in lakes and believes curiosity keeps her alive.
Bernadette Gallagher is the author of The Risen Tree (Revival Press, 2024) her debut poetry collection. She has received awards from the Arts Council of Ireland and Cork County Council and her work has been published in numerous literary journals, recorded by the University College Dublin Poetry Archive and the Words Lightly Spoken podcast.
Mary Turley-McGrath is from Mount Talbot on the Galway/Roscommon border and now lives in Letterkenny. She holds an M. Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin. Mary has published four collections of poetry: her most recent being After Image (Arlen House, 2020). Her poems are included in well-known magazines and anthologies: Cyphers, Crannóg, Drawn to the Light, The SHOp Anthology, Reading the Future, Future Perfect, The Strokestown Anthology, and The Forward Anthology.
Catherine Phil MacCarthy’s poetry books include Daughters of the House (2019), and The Invisible Threshold (2012), Dedalus Press, Dublin. She received the O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry in 2014, a Writer’s Residency at Varuna, NSW, Australia, 2022; and The Yeats Thoor Ballylee Poetry Prize in 2023. A selection in English and Portuguese is due from the University of Saõ Paulo, Brazil, 2024.
Patricia McCarthy edited AGENDA, the international poetry journal, for more than 20 years up until 2023. She won the National Poetry Competition in 2012, was a runner-up twice, and has had six collections of poetry published. She is half Irish, half English, and went to the Holy Child school in Killiney and then to TCD. Her father’s family come from Co. Cork. She lives in the countryside in East Sussex. Patriciamccarthy.co.uk
Aifric Mac Aodha’s first poetry collection, Gabháil Syrinx (The Taking of Syrinx), was published by An Sagart in 2010. She has taught in St Petersburg, New York, and Canada and has lectured in old and modern Irish at UCD. She has been awarded several bursaries by The Arts Council and, in recent years, has read at numerous festivals in Europe, America, India and Canada. Her first bilingual collection, Foreign News, with translations by David Wheatley, was published by The Gallery Press in 2017. She lives in Dublin where she works for the Irish-language publisher An Gúm.
Eileen Sheehan lives in Killarney, County Kerry. One of the poems from her most recent collection, The Narrow Way of Souls (Salmon Poetry), featured on the Leaving Certificate English Syllabus. A selection of her work appears on Poetry International Web with an introductory essay by Paul Casey. She has read at festivals in Ireland and abroad and was Bealtaine Writer in Residence at The Seanchaí Kerry Writers’ Museum, Listowel.
Annemarie Ni Curreain is a poet from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Her books include Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017), Town (The Salvage Press, 2018) and The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021). She is a recipient of the Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award and a co-recipient of The Markievicz Award. She is the current poetry editor at The Stinging Fly magazine. Visit www.studiotwentyfive.com.
Orla Fay is the editor of Drawn to the Light Press https://drawntothelightpress.com/. Her first collection of poetry, Word Skin, was published by Salmon Poetry in December, 2023. Her work has been widely published online and in print, and she has won and been placed in several competitions. She wrote On Beauty at Laytown Strand in Co. Meath. She loves the connectedness writing gives her to the spirit.
Jessica Traynor is a poet and poetry editor at Banshee. Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe, 2022) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and a Guardian Best Summer Read of 2022. She was the 2023 recipient of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry from the University of St Thomas, Minnesota. In 2024, she was awarded the Tundish Award for services to the arts in Ireland. A new collection is forthcoming from Bloodaxe in 2025. She recently was award ed the Field Day Tundish Award.
Casey Jarrin is a poet, artist, educator, editor, and co-founder of the Late Night Diners poetry collective. Her writing appears in Banshee, Abridged, Trumpet, Channel, Stony Thursday Book, Banyan Review, Eiré/Ireland, and Verve Anthology of Protest.
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