Visiting International Poetry Fellows
The Fellowship is part of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) and Queen’s University Belfast’s joint ten-year Seamus Heaney Legacy project and is supported by Atlantic Philanthropies. The appointment is made annually to a distinguished poet of international repute, who will be based at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s for around a month, presenting public readings, workshops and masterclasses for students.

Jane Hirshfield is one of American poetry's central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. She is described as writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today,” according to The New York Times and as “among the modern masters” by The Washington Post. She is the author of nine collections of poetry and two collections of essays, including most recently Ledger (Knopf, 2020). The Asking: New & Selected Poems will appear in 2023 (Knopf, US) and in 2024 (Bloodaxe Books, UK).

Kathleen's poetry collections include The Overhaul, which won the Costa Poetry Prize, and The Tree House, which won the Forward prize. Her non-fiction includes the highly regarded books Findings and Sightlines, both regarded as important contributions to the 'new nature writing'. Her most recent poetry collection, The Bonniest Companie appeared in 2015, and won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award.

Mark Doty is best known for his powerful work written in response to the AIDS epidemic and his nine books of poems include My Alexandria, which won the US National Book Critics Circle Award and became the first book by an American poet to win the T. S. Eliot Prize in the UK in 1995. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he currently lives in New York City.