Please join us for a poetry reading featuring poets from the Seamus Heaney Centre and visiting friends. This event will feature lecturers Gail McConnell (author of The Sun is Open) and Stephen Sexton, as well as Ciaran Carson Writing in the City Fellow, Milena Williamson.

We are pleased to host friends and esteemed poets laureate Jenny Browne (former Poet Laureate of Texas and Distinguished Fulbright Scholar at Queen’s), Dave Lucas (former Poet Laureate of Ohio) and Philip Metres (multi-award winning poet, translator and essayist, Professor of English and Director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University).

Free and open to the public.

Refreshments will be served.

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Jenny Browne is a Professor of English, Creative Writing and Women and Gender Studies at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Her most recent collection is Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems, and her work has been recognized with a James Michener Fellowship, the Cecil Hemley Award from Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and two US/UK Fulbright Awards. After serving concurrent terms as 2016-2018 City of San Antonio Poet Laureate, and 2017-2018 State of Texas Poet Laureate, she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2023.

Dave Lucas is the author of Weather (VQR / Georgia, 2011), which received the 2012 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. From 2018—19 he served as the Poet Laureate of the State of Ohio. His writing has appeared with CNN.com, Granta, The Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry, Slate, and elsewhere. He teaches at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was born and raised.

Gail McConnell is from Belfast. She is interested in living with the dead, violence, creatureliness, queerness and the possibilities and politics of language and form. Her debut poetry book, The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, 2021), about her father’s murder by the IRA, won The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Award and The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. She has also published Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, two poetry pamphlets – Fothermather and Fourteen – and made two arts features based on her poetry for BBC Radio 4. Gail is Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast.

Philip Metres has written numerous books, including Shrapnel Maps and Sand Opera. Winner of Guggenheim and Lannan fellowships, alongside three Arab American Book Awards, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and core faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts M.F.A. program.

Stephen Sexton is the author of two books of poems: If All the World and Love Were Young (2019), winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and Cheryl’s Destinies (2021). In 2020, he was awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

Milena Williamson recently completed her PhD in poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. She is currently the Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow at QUB. She has received the Eric Gregory Award and the Ireland Chair of Poetry project award. Her debut pamphlet, Charm for Catching a Train, was published by Green Bottle Press in 2022.