Featured Alumni
Emily DeDakis
Emily grew up in the Southeast US. She studied literature and history at Tulane University in New Orleans, and moved to Belfast in 2005. Emily completed her MA in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre, before achieving the first PhD in creative writing in Ireland.
Emily is dramaturg and producer for Accidental Theatre, and Project Coordinator at Fighting Words Belfast. She is a scriptreader for New Writing South (Brighton), dramaturgy facilitator for FURYfactory Festival of Ensemble & Devised Theater (San Francisco), and recipient of two dramaturgy fellowships from the BBC Performing Arts Fund.
Caitlin Newby
Caitlin Newby received her BA from Vassar College and her MA (Poetry) and PhD (Creative Writing) from Queen’s University, Belfast. She has poems and translations published in Ambit, gorse, Poetry Ireland Review, and The White Review. In 2018 she was shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize and in 2019 was named the inaugural Bookfinders Chair in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre. She is also the poetry editor of The Tangerine, a magazine of new writing based in Belfast.
Michael J. Daly
Michael J. Daly is currently on a sabbatical from his medical career to undertake an MA in Creative Writing, focussing on drama. To date, Michael has written and produced four short-films with Bosco Production, his own production company: Good Boy (2015), Mother’s Milk and Cookies (2016), Dam (2017) and Forgive Me Not (2019). His first full-length stage-play Pink Carnations is currently in development, and he is now writing his second: Amen.