Poetry Reading Series: Sinead Morrisey and Mary O’Donoghue

Co-sponsored by the College of General Studies and the BU Center for the Humanities, the Poetry Reading Series strives to make poetry a fundamental part of university and community life. By presenting the work of both renowned and emerging poets, the series attempts to broaden our vision of poetry’s concerns and effects. Sinéad Morrissey was born in Portadown, Northern Ireland, in 1972 and has been writing poetry from a very early age. In 1990 she became the youngest poet ever to receive the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry, and has since been honoured with numerous other awards, amongst them the Michael Hartnett Award for Poetry. Her five collections are There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009) and the T S Eliot Prize-winning Parallax (2013) all of which are published by Carcanet Press. She has lived in Germany, Japan and New Zealand and now lectures in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast. She is Belfast's inaugural Poet Laureate. Mary O’Donoghue is a novelist, poet, short story writer, and translator. Her work appears widely in the USA and Ireland: Georgia Review, the Irish Times, Agni, Literary Imagination, Salamander, Dublin Review, Kenyon Review and elsewhere. Her first novel Before the House Burns was published in 2010 (Lilliput Press). She is one of the translators of Seán Ó Ríordáin’s Selected Poems(Yale University Press, 2014). She also collaborates with poet Louis de Paor on translations of his work, most recently in The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue (Bloodaxe Books, 2014). Co-sponsored by BUCH, the Center for the Study of Europe, CITL at CGS and the Institute for the Study of Irish Culture.