Irish Voices: A Reading and Conversation with Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon was born in Portadown, County Armagh and raised near The Moy, in Northern Ireland. He is the youngest member of a group of Northern Irish poets—including Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon—which gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Muldoon’s poems have been collected into three books, Selected Poems 1968-1986 (1986), New Selected Poems: 1968-1994 (1996), and the hefty Poems 1968-1998 (2001). His book Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) won both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the International Griffin Poetry Prize. In addition to poetry, Muldoon has written libretti, rock lyrics for Warren Zevon, The Handsome Family, and his own band, Rackett—and many books for children. The conversation will be moderated by Dan Chiasson, poetry critic at The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Chiasson teaches poetry writing at Wellesley College and is the author of three books of poems, including Natural History (Knopf, 2005) and Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon (Knopf, 2010). Free and open to the public. Reception and book-signing to follow.