Westside Arts Festival/Over The Edge Summer Open-mic

PROBABLY THE BIGGEST LITERARY OPEN-MIC OF THE YEAR

Westside Arts Festival/Over The Edge Summer Open-mic

Over The Edge in association with Westside Arts Festival presents the 2018 Over The Edge Summer Open-mic at Westside Library, Seamus Quirke Road on Wednesday, July 11^th, 5pm-8pm. Those taking part will include visiting students studying creative writing on this year’s NUI Galway International Summer School.

Everyone who has a poem or story to share is most welcome to take part. So, if you have some writing you’d like to read to an audience, this is your opportunity to do so.

The MC for the evening will be Kevin Higgins. All are welcome to attend.

Over The Edge acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council, Poetry Ireland, and Galway City Council.

June Over The Edge Writers’ Gathering presents readings by poets Eleanor Hooker, Nathanael O’Reilly, and Anne Casey PLUS Skylight 47

The June Over The Edge Writers’ Gathering presents an exciting variety of poetry from Galway, Tipperary and Australia. There will be readings by Anne Casey, Nathanael O’Reilly, & Eleanor Hooker PLUS a celebration of the first ten issue of Galway-based poetry newspaper Skylight 47 DETAILS TO BE ANNOUNCED.

The event will take place on Friday, June 29^th, 8pm at The Kitchen @ The Museum, Spanish Arch, Galway. All are welcome. There is no cover charge.

Anne Casey is originally from Clare and now lives in Sydney. Her poems have appeared internationally in newspapers, magazines, journals, anthologies, podcasts, broadcasts, videos, music albums, a stage show and an international art exhibition. Her debut poetry collection, where the lost things go was published to much acclaim by Salmon Poetry in 2017. She has won or been shortlisted for poetry awards in Ireland, Northern Ireland, the USA, UK, Canada and Australia. Over a 25-year career, Anne has worked as a business journalist, magazine editor, media communications director and legal author. Further information: http://anne-casey.com/. Twitter: @1annecasey.

Nathanael O’Reilly was born and raised in Australia. He has travelled on five continents and spent extended periods in England, Ireland, Germany, Ukraine and the United States, where he currently resides. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in ten countries, including Antipodes, Australian Love Poems, Cordite, FourW, Glasgow Review of Books, LiNQ, Mascara, Postcolonial Text, Snorkel, Tincture, Transnational Literature, Verity La and The Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2017. O’Reilly is the recipient of an Emerging Writers Grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. He is the author of Preparations for Departure (UWAP Poetry, 2017), named one of the “2017 Books of the Year” in Australian Book Review; Distance (Picaro Press, 2014; Ginninderra Press, 2015); and the chapbooks Cult (Ginninderra Press, 2016), Suburban Exile (Picaro Press, 2011) and Symptoms of Homesickness (Picaro Press, 2010). He was the writer-in-residence at Booranga Writers’ Centre in May 2017.

Eleanor Hooker is a poet and writer. She lives in North Tipperary with her husband Peter, they have two sons. Her second poetry collection, A Tug of Blue (Dedalus Press) was published October 2016. In 2013 her debut, The Shadow Owner's Companion (Dedalus Press) was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award for Best First Irish collection from 2012. Eleanor is founder of the Rowan Tree Readings, a reading series that will feature international poets and authors. The series begins June 2018.  Her poetry has been published in Ireland and internationally: in the UK, USA, Germany, Poland, Romania, India and Hungary, and in literary journals including: POETRY (Chicago), PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, AGENDA Poetry, The Stinging Fly, The SHOp, The Moth, The Irish Times, The Irish Examiner, Crannóg, POEM: International English Language Quarterly, Cyphers. Online, her poems have been published at Southword, New Dublin Press, And Other Poems, Poethead, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Ofi Press, The Pickled Body, Public Pool and broadcast on RTÉ Radio One. Eleanor has read her poetry at literary events in Ireland, USA (Pittsburgh, Washington), India (Mumbai International Literary Festival) and Hungary (Budapest).

Over The Edge acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Arts Council,

Poetry Ireland, and Galway City Council.

May Over The Edge: Open Reading with Jacqueline Saphra, Anne Walsh Donnelly, Jessamine O’Connor PLUS launch of issue 10 of Skylight 47

The May ‘Over The Edge: Open Reading’ takes place in Galway City Library on Thursday, May 31^st, 6.30-8.00pm. The Featured Readers are Jacqueline Saphra, Jessamine O’Connor, &Anne Walsh Donnelly. The evening will also see the launch, by Jacqueline Saphra, of issue ten of perhaps Ireland’s most exciting, informative, and accessible poetry magazine Skylight 47. There will be readings by contributors. All welcome.  

Anne Walsh Donnelly lives in Mayo. Her work has been published in literary magazines such as Crannog, Boyne Berries and Inside the Bell Jar. Her stories have been shortlisted in competitions such as the Fish International Prize and RTE Radio One Frances Mac Manus competition. She was highly commended in the OTE New Writer of the Year (Poetry) Award in 2017 and recently won The Blue Nib Poetry Chapbook competition.

Jessamine O Connor facilitates The Hermit Collective arts troupe, The Wrong Side Of The Tracks Writers, and the Ballaghaderreen branch of Failte Isteach conversational English classes. She won the iYeats, the Francis Ledwidge, and the Poetry Ireland Butlers Café poetry competitions, and was short-listed for the Hennessy, Over The Edge, Cuirt New Writing, Galway Hospital Poems For Patience, Bradshaw Books, Leaf Books and Red Line Book Festival competitions. She is currently promoting her fifth chapbook Pact, and her first full collection of poems is coming out with Salmon in early 2020. Jessamine’s website is http://www.jessamineoconnor.com

Jacqueline Saphra

Jacqueline Saphra’s The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye 2011) was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. If I Lay on my Back I Saw Nothing but Naked Women was published by (The Emma Press 2017) won the Saboteur Award for Best Collaborative Work. In 2017 A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller was out from Hercules Editions and her latest collection from Nine Arches Press, All My Mad Mothers, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot prize. She lives in London and teaches at The Poetry School. www.jacquelinesaphra.com

Copies of the new issue of Skylight 47 will be on sale on the evening. The MC for the evening will be Susan Millar DuMars. For further details phone 087-6431748

Over The Edge acknowledges the ongoing generous financial support of Galway City Council, Poetry Ireland & The Arts Council.

May Over The Edge Writers' Gathering - launch of four books PLUS 2018 Poems for Patience Winner

The May Over The Edge Writers’ Gathering presents an exciting variety of poetry and fiction, including the Galway launch of new poetry collections by Stephanie Conn, Robyn Rowland and Kate Ennals; the launch of Belfast writer Rosemary Jenkinson’s acclaimed new short story collection; and a reading from her work by Ruth Quinlan, the winner of the 2018 Poems For Patience competition. The event will take place at The Kitchen @ The Museum, Spanish Arch, Galway on Friday, May 18^th, 8pm. All are welcome. There is no cover charge.

Stephanie Conn

Stephanie Conn, from County Antrim, is a graduate of the Creative Writing M.A. Programme at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. She is the winner of the 2015 Funeral Services NI Poetry Prize, the 2015 Yeovil Poetry Prize, the inaugural Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing and the 2016 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, which culminated in the publication of Copeland’s Daughter. Stephanie has also been shortlisted for many awards, including the 2012 Patrick Kavanagh Award and is the recipient of an ACES award. Her debut collection, The Woman from the Other Side, which we published in 2016, was shortlisted for the 2016 Shine/Strong Award. Stephanie’s follow-up collection entitled Island is published in May, 2018 by Doire Press.

Rosemary Jenkinson

Rosemary Jenkinson was born in Belfast and is an award-winning playwright and short story writer. Her plays include The Bonefire (winner of Stewart Parker BBC Radio Award 2006), The Winners, Johnny Meister + the Stitch, Basra Boy, White Star of the North, Planet Belfast and Meeting Miss Ireland. She won the 2001 Black Hill Magazine Short Story Competition, third prize in the Brian Moore Short Story Awards and was shortlisted for the 2002 Hennessy Award for New Writing. Her first collection of short stories, Contemporary Problems Nos. 53 & 54, was published in 2004 by Lapwing Press. Her second short story collection, Aphrodite’s Kiss & Further Stories, was published by Whittrick Press in 2016. She’s won many General Artist’s Awards from the ACNI and this year she has been awarded Artist-in-Residence at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast. Rosemary’s new short-story collection entitled Catholic Boys is published in May, 2018 by Doire Press. 

 

Robyn Rowland

Robyn Rowland is an Irish-Australian citizen living in both countries. She regularly works in Turkey. She has written 13 books, 10 of poetry. Her latest books are Mosaics from the Map (Doire Press, Galway, 2018), which will have its Galway launch on the evening, and her bi-lingual This Intimate War Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915 – İçli Dışlı Bir Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915 (republished, Spinifex Press, Australia, 2018). Turkish trans. Mehmet Ali Çelikel. Robyn’s poetry appears in national and international journals and in over forty anthologies, including eight editions of Best Australian Poems. Her work is on film at the National Irish Poetry Archives, James Joyce Library, UCD. Dublin.

Kate Ennals

Kate Ennals is a poet and writer and has published poems and short stories in a range of literary and on line journals (Crannog, Skylight 47, Honest Ulsterman, Anomaly, The International Lakeview Journal, Boyne Berries, North West Words, The Blue Nib, Dodging the Rain plus many more). In 2017, she won the Westport Arts Festival Poetry Competition. Her first collection of poetry At The Edge was published in 2015. Her second collection, Threads, was published in April 2018 and will have its Galway launch on the evening. She has lived in Ireland for 25 years and currently runs poetry and writing workshops in County Cavan. Kate runs At The Edge, Cavan, a literary reading evening, funded by the Cavan Arts Office. Before doing an MA in Writing at NUI Galway in 2012, Kate worked in UK local government and the Irish community sector for thirty years, supporting local groups to engage in local projects and initiatives. Her blog can be found at http://kateennals.com 

Ruth Quinlan

This year Ruth Quinlan’s poem ‘Small Acts of Anticipation’ was the winning entry in Galway University Hospital’s Arts Trust’s hotly contested annual Poems  for Patience competition.   The poem will now be included in the Arts Trust’s Poems for Patience permanent poetry collection, on display in Galway University Hospitals. Ruth Quinlan won the 2014 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Award and the 2012 Hennessy Literary Award for First Fiction. She has been shortlisted or runner-up for other competitions like Cúirt New Writing, the Francis Ledwidge Poetry Awards, and Doolin Writers’ Weekend.

Over The Edge acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Arts Council,

Poetry Ireland, and Galway City Council.

MAY POETRY WORKSHOPS AT GALWAY ARTS CENTRE

Starting in May, Galway Arts Centre is offering aspiring poets a choice of three poetry workshops, all facilitated by poet Kevin Higgins, whose best-selling first collection, The Boy With No Face, published by Salmon Poetry, was short-listed for the 2006 Strong Award for Best First Collection by an Irish poet. Kevin’s second collection of poems, Time Gentlemen, Please, was published in 2008 by Salmon Poetry and his poetry is discussed in The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry. His third collection Frightening New Furniture was published in 2010 by Salmon. His work also appears in the generation defining anthology Identity Parade –New British and Irish Poets (Ed. Roddy Lumsden, Bloodaxe, 2010) and The Hundred Years’ War: modern war poems (Ed Neil Astley, Bloodaxe April 2014).  A collection of Kevin’s essays and book reviews, Mentioning The War, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2012. Kevin’s poetry has been translated into Greek, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese & Portuguese. His fourth collection of poetry, The Ghost in the Lobby, was published in 2014 by Salmon. Kevin's poetry was the subject of a paper 'The Case of Kevin Higgins, or, The Present State of Irish Poetic Satire' presented by David Wheatley at a Symposium on Satire at the University of Aberdeen. Kevin was satirist-in-residence with the alternative literature website The Bogman’s Cannon 2015-16 and is Writer-in-Residence at University Hospitals Galway. 2016 – The Selected Satires of Kevin Higgins was published by NuaScéalta in early 2016; a pamphlet of Kevin’s recent political poems The Minister For Poetry Has Decreed was published in 2016 by  the new Culture Matters imprint of U.K. based Manifesto Press. Song of Songs 2:0 – New & Selected Poems is published by Salmon (Spring 2017) and launched at the 2017 Cúirt Festival. The Stinging Fly magazine recently described Kevin as “likely the most widely read living poet in Ireland”. His poems have been quoted in The Daily Telegraph, The Times (UK), The Independent, The Daily Mirror, on Tonight With Vincent Browne; and read aloud by film director Ken Loach at a political meeting in London.

Kevin Higgins

Each week Kevin will give participants a poetry writing exercise for the following week and will offer each participant constructive suggestions as to how her or his poem can become the best possible poem it can be.

Kevin is an experienced workshop facilitator and several of his students have gone on to achieve publication success. One of his workshop participants at Galway Arts Centre won the prestigious Hennessy Award for New Irish Poetry, two have won the Cúirt New Writing Prize, and yet another the Cúirt Poetry Grand Slam, while several have published collections of their poems; two being shortlisted for the Shine-Strong Award for Best First Collection of poems. In 2013 a group of his students set up the poetry newspaper Skylight 47, which publishes new poems, reviews of poetry books and opinion pieces about poetry related matters. Kevin teaches poetry on the NUIG BA Creative Writing Connect programme and is Creative Writing Director for the NUI Galway Summer School. Kevin is also co-organiser of the successful Over The Edge reading series which specialises in promoting new writers.

Each workshop will run for eight weeks, commencing the week of Monday May 14^th.  They will take place on Tuesday evenings, 7-8.30pm (first class Tuesday, May 15^th); on Thursday afternoons, 2-4pm (first class Thursday, May 17^th) and on Friday afternoons, 2-3.30pm (first class Friday, May 18^th).

The Tuesday evening and Friday afternoon workshops are open to both complete beginners as well as those who’ve been writing for some time. The Thursday afternoon workshop is an Advanced Poetry Workshop, suitable for those who’ve participated in poetry workshops before or had poems published in magazines. The cost to participants is €90, with a €80 concession rate.

Places must be paid for in advance. To reserve a place contact reception at Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick Street, phone 091 565886, email info@galwayartscentre.ie, or go to GalwayArtsCentre.ie