Over The Edge features on RTE Radio One's The Arts Show

Fergal McNally

Mary Madec

Susan Millar DuMars

The Over The Edge Cúirt Festival Showcase reading was featured on RTE Radio One's The Arts Show yesterday evening. To hear readings by and interviews with Mary Madec & Fergal McNally and an interview with Over The Edge MC and founder Susan Millar DuMars click on http://www.rte.ie/arts/2008/0424/theartsshow.html

Mary Madec Wins Hennessy Award for New Irish Poetry

Galway-based poet, Mary Madec, has won The Sunday Tribune Hennessy Award for New Irish Poetry.





The announcement was made at a gala lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel in Dublin earlier today. Mary is a participant in the Advanced Poetry Workshop at Galway Arts Centre and will be reading at this year's Cúirt Festival Over The Edge Showcase Reading at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway on Thursday, April 24th at 11am.

2008 Cúirt Festival/Over The Edge showcase reading

Mary Mullen

Fergal McNally

Mary Madec

Megan Buckley

The 2008 Cúirt Festival/Over The Edge Showcase reading will take place on Thursday, April 24th, 11am in the Town Hall Theatre, Galway.

http://www.galwayartscentre.ie/cuirt

Mary Mullen is an Alaskan-born writer who has lived in south County Galway for a decade. Her work has been published in We Alaskans, Sunday Miscellany 2003-2004, The Stinging Fly, the Cork Literary Review, Galway Now, West47online, the Anchorage Daily News, and the chapbook The Whole Building Could Be On Fire. She is working on a collection of personal history essays and short stories. Mary is a graduate of NUIG’s MA in Writing programme. She is currently facilitating a memoir writing class at Galway Arts Centre. She was a Featured Reader at the January 2007 Over The Edge: Open Reading.

Fergal Mc Nally is originally from Navan. He enrolled at N.U.I.G in 2003 where he studied English, political science and sociology. In 2007 he graduated with a first from the university’s M.A. in Writing programme. He has twice had poetry published in ROPES magazine. His one act play Spilt Milk won best production in the 2007 Muscailt Festival one act play series. His work was displayed during Cúirt last year as part of DOCUMENT, a collaborative project between writers and artists. He is currently working on his first novel. He was a Featured Reader at the May 2007 Over The Edge: Open Reading.

Mary Madec was born in County Mayo. She started writing poetry about four years ago and since then has published in Crannóg, West 47, The Cúirt Annual, the SHOp, The Sunday Tribune, WOW and Iota among others. In Spring 2007 she was chosen for the Poetry Ireland Introductions; in July she was runner-up in the Raftery competition and chosen for the WINDOWS showcase and anthology. Last autumn she started up a community-writing project Away with Words for people with intellectual disabilities. Mary has just been short-listed for this year's Hennessy Literary Awards for New Irish Writing in the Emerging Poetry category. She was a Featured Reader at the November 2005 Over The Edge: Open Reading.

Megan Buckley is a Doctoral Teaching Fellow in the English Department at NUI, Galway, where she teaches seminars on nineteenth-century women's poetry. Her poems have been published in the US, the UK, and Ireland, in publications such as The Ledge (US), The Pedestal (US), eclectica.org (US); the Dazzle and Attract Project in Newcastle-on-Tyne, UK, in which one of her poems was projected onto the wall of a building (UK); Crannóg, ROPES, TribeVibes, and others. She collaborated with visual artists in DOCUMENT, 2005 and 2006, and she was shortlisted for the Over The Edge Writer of the Year Award in 2007. She was a Featured Reader at the November 2007 Over The Edge: Open Reading.

Over The Edge acknowledges the ongoing support of the Cúirt international festival of literature, Galway City Library, Sheridan's Wine Bar, Galway City Council & The Arts Council.

Over The Edge Alumni Shortlisted for Hennessy Literary Awards

Mary Madec

Michelle O'Sullivan

Aoife Casby

Mary Madec, Michelle O'Sullivan & Aoife Casby are three of the six poets shortlisted in the New Irish Poetry category for this year's Sunday Tribune Hennessy Literary Awards. The winners in each category, the other categories being First Fiction and Emerging Fiction, will be announced, as will the Sunday Tribune Hennessy New Irish Writer of The Year, at a gala lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel in Dublin on Tuesday, April 22nd. This year's judges are Eílis Ní Dhuibhne & Douglas Kennedy.

Mary Madec was born in County Mayo. She started writing poetry about four years ago and since then has published in Crannóg, West 47, The Cúirt Annual, the SHOp, The Sunday Tribune, WOW and Iota among others. In Spring 2007 she was chosen for the Poetry Ireland Introductions; in July she was runner-up in the Raftery competition and chosen for the WINDOWS showcase and anthology. Last autumn she started up a community-writing project Away with Words for people with intellectual disabilities. She has attended a number of poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre and was a Featured Reader at the November 2005 Over The Edge: Open Reading. Mary will also read at the 2008 Cúirt Festival Over The Edge Showcase reading at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway on Thursday, April 24th at 11am.

Michelle O’Sullivan lives in County Mayo. She has an MA in Literature. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of prestigious publications such as The Shop, Poetry Ireland Review, The Sunday Tribune & Agenda. She has work forthcoming in PN Review & The Southern Indiana Review. She is currently working on a collection of poetry as well as a collection of short fiction. Michelle has been selected to take part in this year's Poetry Ireland Introductions series of readings. She was a Featured Reader at the March 2008 Over The Edge: Open Reading.

Aoife Casby lives in Carraroe. Her poetry and fiction have been published in The Sunday Tribune, The Cork Literary Review, The Divas anthology (Arlen House) and The Cuirt Annual. In 2006 she completed an MA in Writing at NUI Galway, and was highly commended in the Start Poetry Chapbook competition. Aoife was chosen to take part in last year’s Poetry Ireland Introductions Readings. She was a Featured Reader at the August 2003 Over The Edge: Open Reading and also read at last year's Cúirt Festival Over The Edge Showcase reading.

Salmon Poetry launches first collections by Lorna Shaughnessy & Susan Millar DuMars

Big Pink Umbrella by Susan Millar DuMars & Torching the Brown River by Lorna Shaughnessy

Salmon Poetry invites you to celebrate the publication of two debut poetry collections

Big Pink Umbrella
by Susan Millar DuMars

and

Torching the Brown River
by Lorna Shaughnessy

Venue: The City Museum, Spanish Arch, Galway

Date/Time: Saturday 19th April, 1pm

Launch introductions by Dolores Lyne & Moya Cannon

With music by pianist Anna Mullarkey

Susan Millar DuMars was born in Philadelphia in 1966. She holds an MA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. Her poems and short stories have been published widely in the US, UK and Ireland. Her poetry was included in the 2004 Anthology I, published by Ainnir; in 2005, Lapwing published a pamphlet of her poems, the well reviewed Everyone Loves Me. Susan's stories have been short-listed for many awards, and in 2005 she received an Irish Arts Council Bursary for her fiction. American Girls, a volume of her short stories, was published by Lapwing in 2007. Susan lives in Galway, Ireland. Since 2003, Susan and her husband Kevin Higgins have organised the successful Over the Edge reading series, showcasing new writers. Big Pink Umbrella is the first full collection of her poetry.

Millar DuMars' sense of language, ingrained in the poet's attitude toward her poems, is why they can move such extraordinary distances in tone, language and theme, building to conclusions of breath-taking clarity and directness. Patricia Prime, New Hope International Review

Susan Millar DuMars will not rush sadness, but instead makes language do its poignant job of revealing and evoking strong feelings... Her style of retelling is unique; she doesn't mince her words, she spares them and makes them work. Rita Ann Higgins

Purchase the book online at http://www.salmonpoetry.com/bigpinkumbrella.html


Lorna Shaughnessy was born in Belfast and lives in County Galway. She lectures in the Department of Spanish, NUI Galway. In 2006 she was selected to read at the inaugural Cúirt Festival Over The Edge showcase reading. She has published two translations of contemporary Mexican poetry, Mother Tongue. Selected Poems by Pura López Colomé and If We Have Lost our Oldest Tales by María Baranda, both with Arlen House (2006). Torching the Brown River is her first full collection of poetry.

Lorna Shaughnessy's first collection of poetry explores the nature of loss, the possibility of change and the ephemeral world of relationships. Her heart is her true barometer as she weaves a delicate web of verse. This assured collection, with its arduous sense of enquiry, crosses borderlines of time and space, speech and silence, mapping the poet’s creative journey with an eye firmly on the rear-view mirror. En route, we encounter the poet’s great gift for apt metaphors with their surprising signposts that lead to fresh engagements with the world of myth and reality. Noel Monahan

Purchase the book online at http://www.salmonpoetry.com/torching.html
For further information, please contact Jessie or Siobhán at 065-7081941 or email info@salmonpoetry.com

Salmon Poetry, Knockeven, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare
http://www.salmonpoetry.com/

Love Poetry, Hate Racism

This year's 'LOVE POETRY, HATE RACISM' night

in association with the Arts Office NUI, Galway

takes place in

BOI Theatre, NUI, Galway

@ 7pm

on Saturday 19th of April

tickets: €3 on the door

for more info. email: lovepoetrygalway@gmail.com