Westside Arts Festival/Over The Edge Summer Open-mic

PROBABLY THE BIGGEST LITERARY OPEN-MIC OF THE YEAR

Over The Edge in association with Westside Arts Festival presents the 2017 Over The Edge Summer Open-mic at Westside Library, Seamus Quirke Road on Wednesday, July 12^th, 6-8pm

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.  

Those taking part will include visiting students studying creative writing on this year’s NUI Galway International Summer School.

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 Karen McDonnell, Eamonn Lynskey, Anne Tannam, & Maeve Mulrennan & Galway launch of short story collection by June Caldwell

June Over The Edge Writers’ Gathering presents readings by Karen McDonnell, Eamonn Lynskey, Anne Tannam, & Maeve Mulrennan & the Galway launch of June Caldwell’s debut short story collection. The event will take place on Thursday, June 29th, 8pm at the Kitchen @ The Museum, Spanish Arch, Galway. All are welcome. There is no cover charge.

June Caldwell worked for many years as a freelance journalist and now writes fiction. Room Little Darker, a short story collection, was published by New Island Books in May 2017. Her short story ‘SOMAT’ was published in the award-winning anthology The Long Gaze Back, edited by Sinéad Gleeson and was chosen as a ‘favourite’ by The Sunday Times. She’s a prizewinner of the Moth International Short Story Prize and has been shortlisted for many others, including the Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Colm Toíbín International Short Story Award, the Lorian Hemingway Prize, and the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University Belfast, and lives in Dublin.

June Caldwell

Bred, buttered and living in Dublin, Anne Tannam's first book of poetry Take This Life, was published by WordsOnTheStreet in 2011. Her second collection Tides ShiftingAcross My Sitting Room Floor is just published by Salmon Poetry. A spoken word artist, Anne has performed her work at Lingo, Electric Picnic, Cuirt and other festivals around Ireland and is co-founder of the renowned Dublin Writers' Forum.

Eamonn Lynskey’s poetry first appeared in the New Irish Writing pages of the Irish Press in the 1980s, edited by David Marcus, and since then widely in magazines and journals such Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, The SHOp, Crannóg, The Stony Thursday Book, The Stinging Fly, Boyne Berries, Orbis, Riposte Broadsheet and the Irish Times. He was a finalist in the Strokestown International Poetry Competition and in the Hennessy Awards. He has been involved in the organization of poetry events in Dublin for many years and has presented poetry programmes on local radio. He obtained an M. Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin in 2012 and participated in the 2013 Stanza Poetry Festival in St. Andrews in Scotland. Before retirement he worked as a teacher and Adult Education organizer.  Eamonn’s third collection of poetry, It’s Time, is just published by Salmon Poetry.

Maeve Mulrennan is a curator and writer based in Galway. She is the Head of Visual Art + Education in Galway Arts Centre, where she has worked since 2006. This role includes exhibitions, critical writing, residencies and education programming. In 2008 she founded Red Bird Youth Collective, which is now a youth led art collective working in visual art, architecture, animation and film. Maeve has been on the Board of Directors of Tulca Festival of Visual Art since 2006. Maeve lectures on the MA Arts Policy & Practice in Huston School of Digital Media, NUI Galway and is an online-Lecturer with NODE Center for Curatorial Studies, Berlin. Maeve is a short story writer, with fiction published in several online journals, The Doire Press 2013 Anthology and The Galway Review. She read at the 2012 Cúirt Festival / Over The Edge showcase reading.

Karen J. McDonnell grew up in Ennis. She spent many years in Dublin working in international banking and as an actress before returning to live in the Burren in north Clare. As a mature student at NUI Galway, she focused increasingly on writing, including Notes from the Margins, a poetic song cycle about women on the edges of history, and literary non-fiction: Unsettled — a West Bank Journal. She won the 2014 WOW Poetry Award and was runner up in the 2015 Wild Atlantic Words and the 2015 Baffle poetry competitions. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Poems for Patience Award. Karen’s debut collection of poems This Little World is just published by Doire Press.

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 Eileen Battersby, Kathryn Guille, & Chris Connolly

The May ‘Over The Edge: Open Reading’ takes place in Galway City Library on Thursday, May 25^th, 6.30-8.00pm. The Featured Readers are Eileen Battersby, Chris Connolly, & Kathryn Guille. There will as usual be an open-mic after the Featured Readers have finished. New readers are especially welcome. 

Kathryn Guille

Kathryn Guille is an American writer and choreographer living in Limerick City. Her screenplay, Enemy of the Freak State, has won the David Dortort Prize for Screenwriting, and her play, Venla and Henry has won the Alice Stark Award for Playwriting. Kathryn is a founding member of the New York Time’s acclaimed Ateh Theatre Group. She was an Off-Broadway and regional fight director and actress for over ten years before moving to Ireland. Kathryn holds a BFA from NYU’s TISCH School of the Arts, and an MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York. Kathryn was the winner of the 2016 Cúirt New Writing Poetry Prize. She is now a participant in the Thursday afternoon Advanced Poetry Workshop at Galway Arts Centre.

Chris Connolly

Chris Connolly writes fiction and was born in Dublin in 1983. In 2016, for his short stories, he won both the RTE Francis McManus Award and the Hennessy Award for Emerging Fiction. He is also the 2016 Over The Edge New Writer of the Year and this featured reading is part of prize. Novelist Niamh Boyce, who judged the 2016 Over The Edge New Writer of the Year and chose Chris as her overall winner, had this about his winning story: ‘There's no one new around you’,  showed an awareness of form usually found in poetry and applied it to a short story. It worked because it expressed the tensions within the story, the tensions in life to conform, to contain something that cannot be contained

Eileen Battersby

Eileen Battersby is literary correspondent of the Irish Times. She has written about all aspects of the arts, particularly classical music and literature, as well as archaeology, historical geography and architectural history and has championed fiction in translation. Four times winner of the Arts Journalist of the Year award, she has most recently won the Critic of the Year. Her first novel Teethmarks On My Tongue was published late last year by Dalkey Archive Press to very favourable reviews by, among others, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Edmund White in The Huffington Post. 

As usual there will be an open-mic after the Featured Readers have finished. New readers are always most welcome at the open-mic. 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 presents Poems for Patience winners & launch of poetry collection by Aoife Reilly

The May Over The Edge Writers’ Gathering presents an exciting variety of poetry, including the launch of Aoife Reilly’s debut poetry collection.  There will also be readings by the winners of this year’s Poems for Patience competition, Lorna Shaughnessy and Marie Cadden, and American poets Ron Houchin and Art Stringer. The event will take place at The Kitchen @ The Museum, Spanish Arch, Galway on Friday, May 12^th, 8pm. All are welcome. There is no cover charge.

Aoife Reilly

Aoife Reilly is originally from Laois, but has been living in Galway since 2012. She works as a psychotherapist and teacher and has been attending Kevin Higgins’s poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre since Autumn 2013. Aoife’s poetry has been published in Crannóg, Skylight 47, on the Poethead website, and in a wide variety of other poetry magazines recently. Aoife was a Featured Reader at the August 2015 Over The Edge: Open Reading and was also selected to read at the 2016 Cúirt Festival / Over The Edge New Writers’ Showcase. Her debut poetry collection Lilac and Gooseberries is just published by Lapwing Press.

Art Stringer is the author of the poetry collections Channel Markers (Wesleyan University Press), Human Costume (Salmon Poetry) and Late Breaking, also published by Salmon. His work has appeared in such journals as The Nation, Antaeus, The Ohio Review, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, and in Backcountry: Contemporary Writing in West Virginia.  He also edited and introduced an edition of Louise McNeill’s Paradox Hill (West Virginia University Press). For twenty-five years, he taught writing and literature at Marshall University. Art will be reading from his new poetry collection which is just published by Salmon Poetry.

Lorna Shaughnessy was born in Belfast and lives in Co. Galway, Ireland. She has published three poetry collections, Torching the Brown River, Witness Trees, & Anchored (Salmon, 2008, 2011, & 2015), and her work was selected for the Forward Book of Poetry, 2009. She is also a translator of Spanish and South American Poetry. Her most recent translation was of poetry by Galician writer Manuel Rivas, The Disappearance of Snow (Shearsman Press, 2012), which was shortlisted for the UK Poetry Society’s 2013 Popescu Prize for translation. She lectures in Spanish and Creative Writing in NUI, Galway. Lorna is the joint winner of this year’s Poems for Patience competition for her poem ‘The Dual Citizen’ which is now framed and displayed in University Hospital Galway.

Ron Houchin was born in San Diego, California, and raised from the age of three in Huntington, West Virginia.  He comes from a family of factory workers, coal miners, and farmers who have always lived in Appalachia. For thirty years he taught in an Ohio public school in the southernmost tip of Ohio. The Quiet Jars, a new and selected poetry collection, was published in 2013 by Salmon Publishing and a short story collection, Tales Out Of School, was published, also in 2013, from Wind Publications of Kentucky. Ron lives in a haunted house, built by the grandson of an ex-slave, on the banks of the Ohio River. He will be reading from his latest poetry collection which is just published by Salmon Poetry.

Marie Cadden lives in Spiddal, Co. Galway. Her acclaimed debut poetry collection Gynaecologist in The Jacuzzi was published last year by Salmon Poetry. Winner of the Cuirt 2011 New Writing Prize for Poetry,  Runner-Up 2012 Westport Arts Festival Poetry Prize,  Third Prize 2012 Francis Ledwidge Poetry Competition.   Shortlisted for Desmond O'Grady Poetry Competition 2012, Bradshaw Books/Cork Literary Review Manuscript Competition 2011, Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Award 2010. Her poems have been published in The Recorder (USA), THE SHOp, ROPES, Revival, Boyne Berries, and the anthologies Mosaic (2011), and Lady Gregory's Townhouse (2009). A co-editor of “Ireland’s most interesting poetry magazine” Skylight 47, Marie is the joint winner of this year’s Poems for Patience competition for her poem ‘In Praise of Denial’ which is now framed and displayed in University Hospital Galway.                       

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