Ep. 18: Pat Boran
Poet, writer and broadcaster Pat Boran is one of the best-known of his generation of Irish poets.
He has published more than a dozen books of poetry and prose — among them Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku (2015), A Man is Only As Good: A Pocket Selected Poems (2017) and Then Again (2019), as well as the humorous memoir The Invisible Prison (2009) and the popular writers' handbook The Portable Creative Writing Workshop, now in its fourth edition.
He is a former presenter of The Poetry Programme and The Enchanted Way on RTÉ Radio 1, and he works part-time as a literary editor in which capacity he has edited numerous anthologies of poetry and prose, including, with Gerard Smyth, the bestselling If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song (the Dublin: One City, One Book designated title for 2014) and, with Eugene O’Connell, The Deep Heart’s Core: Irish Poets Revisit a Touchstone Poems (2017).
Volumes of his poetry have been published in a number of languages, most recently in Portuguese – o sussurro da cords / the swoosh of the rope (trans. Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho, edições Eufeme, 2018).
He is a member of Aosdána, Ireland’s affiliation of creative artists. www.patboran.com
Ep. 17: Emily Bazelon
Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and is the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School. She is also the author of the national best-seller “Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy” and a co-host of Slate’s “Political Gabfest,” a weekly podcast.
Before joining the Times Magazine, Ms. Bazelon was a writer and editor for nine years at Slate, where she co-founded the women’s section DoubleX. She has previously been a Soros media fellow and has worked as an editor and writer at Legal Affairs magazine and as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit. She has appeared on TV shows including “The Colbert Report” and “PBS NewsHour” and radio programs including “Fresh Air,” “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered,” “This American Life,” and “Here and Now.” Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Vogue, and the Washington Post, among other publications. Emily is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School.
bio from The New York Times
Ep. 16: Ian Davidson
Ian Davidson is Professor of Poetry in University College Dublin.
His poetry is gathered in three full-length collections from Shearsman, as well as chapbooks from Shearsman, Spectacular Diseases and West House Books. He has also published two critical volumes with Palgrave Macmillan.
His book, The Matter of the Heart, is forthcoming from New Dublin Press in 2020.
Ep. 15: Una Mullally
Una Mullally is one of Ireland’s most prominent journalists, broadcasters, activists and public thinkers.
She is a columnist for The Irish Times and The Guardian newspapers, the author of In the Name of Love (an oral history of Ireland’s marriage equality movement) and editor of Repeal the 8th, an anthology about reproductive rights in Ireland. She frequently contributes to current affairs programmes, documentaries, and chat shows as a commentator, guest and pundit across all Irish national broadcasters (RTE1, RTE2, TV3, TG4), as well as BBC Northern Ireland, BBC1, UTV, Sky News, etc. www.unamullally.com
Ep. 14: Benjamin Dwyer
Benjamin Dwyer is one of Ireland’s leading composers and performers.
He is an elected member of Aosdána (the Irish government-sponsored academy of creative artists) and an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, London (ARAM). He is currently Professor of Music at Middlesex University, London.
Dwyer’s music is forged from an intensive amalgamation of technical and interpretative elements. Experienced at the intersection of compositional, performance and improvisational praxes, his music is further enriched through its deep immersion in ritual, symbol, literature, dance movement, film and the political. His works have been performed worldwide by renowned musicians and ensembles.
Ep. 13: Christina Davis
Christina Davis is an American poet and curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room in Harvard University.
Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Jubilat, New Republic, Pleiades, Paris Review. She was on a “Louder Than Words” panel at the 2009 Association of Writers & Writing Programs. Her first collection, Forth A Raven, was published in 2006 by Alice James Books, and her second collection, An Ethic, in 2013 by Nightboat.
Ep. 12: Diarmaid Ferriter (Part 1 & 2)
Diarmaid Ferriter is one of Ireland's best-known historians and is Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD. His books include The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 (2004), Judging Dev: A Reassessment of the life and legacy of Eamon de Valera (2007), Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (2009) and Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s (2012), and The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics (2019). He is a regular broadcaster on television and radio and a weekly columnist with the Irish Times. In 2010 he presented a three-part history of twentieth century Ireland, The Limits of Liberty, on RTE television.
Ep. 11: Joyce, Beckett, and Mary Manning Howe
In this episode, presenter and producer Jonathan C. Creasy explores the exile and independence of three Dublin writers: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Mary Manning Howe.
The piece is based on a talk Creasy gave at the 2019 American Conference for Irish Studies in Boston, Massachusetts. It explores these writers’ need to separate themselves from Ireland and examines the work they carried out in artistic exile.
Ep. 10: Leontia Flynn
LEONTIA FLYNN has published four collections of poems. These Days (Jonathan Cape, 2004) won an Eric Gregory Award in manuscript, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, and Flynn named as one of twenty ‘Next Generation’ poets by the Poetry Book Society.
Drives was published by Jonathan Cape in 2008, when Flynn won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council Northern Ireland. Profit and Loss was Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2011. Leontia Flynn received the 17th annual Lawrence O’Shaughnessy award for Irish poetry in 2013 and the AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund literary award in 2014. The Radio was published in 2017, was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize ad won the Irish Times Poetry Now Prize.
Flynn was born in 1974. She lives in Belfast.
Ep. 9: Maurice Scully
MAURICE SCULLY was born in Dublin in 1952 and spent his childhood between Clare, the Ring Gaeltacht, and Dublin. He was educated at Trinity College Dublin.
He has been editor of a number of influential magazines (Icarus, The Beau), and through the 1970s and 1980s organised important readings and literary events.
In a writing career that began in the early 1970s he has published over a dozen volumes of poetry and taken part in conferences and festivals in Ireland, the UK, and the US, where his readings are prized as key interpretations of his complex, engaging work.
For 25 years Scully’s work was devoted to a single vast project under the overall title of Things That Happen which consists of 5 Freedoms of Movement, Livelihood, Sonata, and Tig, the coda to the whole work. See his publications here.
After many years living in Italy, Africa and the west of Ireland, he settled with his wife and four children in Dublin, where he taught for a time at Dublin City University.
He is a member of Aosdána.
Ep. 8: Robert Pinsky
ROBERT PINSKY is a poet, essayist, translator, teacher, and speaker. His first two terms as United States Poet Laureate were marked by such visible dynamism—and such national enthusiasm in response—that the Library of Congress appointed him to an unprecedented third term. Throughout his career, Pinsky has been dedicated to identifying and invigorating poetry’s place in the world.
Known worldwide, Pinsky’s work has earned him the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize, Italy’s Premio Capri, the Korean Manhae Award, and the Harold Washington Award from the City of Chicago, among other accolades.
Pinsky is a professor of English and creative writing in the graduate writing program at Boston University. In 2015 the university named him a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, the highest honor bestowed on senior faculty members who are actively involved in teaching, research, scholarship, and university civic life.
Ep. 7: Paul Perry
PAUL PERRY is the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of several books of poetry and prose. A winner of the Hennessy Prize for Irish Literature, he is a poet, novelist, and screen-writer. As Karen Perry, he has co-authored, four international best-selling novels, including Girl Unknown, which is published in The US by Henry Holt, and has been optioned for screen. His poetry collections include The Drowning of the Saints, The Orchid Keeper, 108 Moons; Selected Translations of Jurga Ivanauskaita, The Last Falcon and Small Ordinance, and most recently Gunpowder Valentine: New and Selected Poems, Dedalus Press. He lives in Dublin, Ireland, where he is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin.
Ep. 6: Senator David Norris
SENATOR DAVID NORRIS is an Irish scholar, independent Senator, and civil rights activist. He is a renowned James Joyce scholar, credited with turning around Joyce’s reputation in Ireland and establishing the James Joyce Cultural Centre. Senator Norris was one of the leading figures in the early gay rights movement in Ireland.
Jonathan C. Creasy spoke with Senator Norris in his home in Dublin about Joyce, history, politics, and - yes - Brexit…
Ep. 5: Emilie Pine
EMILIE PINE is Associate Professor of Modern Drama at University College Dublin. Pine is Editor of the Irish University Review and Director of the Irish Memory Studies Network (www.irishmemorystudies.com). She has published widely in the field of Irish studies and memory studies, including The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Palgrave, 2011) and The Memory Marketplace: Performance, Testimony and Witnessing in Contemporary Theatre (forthcoming Indiana University Press, 2019).
Her first collection of personal essays, Notes to Self, is published by Tramp Press (2018).
Ep. 4: Border Poet Benjamin Alire Sáenz
BENJAMIN ALIRE SÁENZ is a poet, painter, novelist, and activist living and working on the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. Jonathan C. Creasy visited Sáenz on the border, where the two writers had hours of conversation about poetry, history, and politics. This episode is a selection of excerpts from those conversations.
Sáenz is an author of poetry and prose for adults and teens. He is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the American Book Award for his books for adults. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe was a Printz Honor Book, the Stonewall Award winner, the Pura Belpre Award winner, the Lambda Literary Award winner, and a finalist for the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award. His first novel for teens, Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood, was an ALA Top Ten Book for Young Adults and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book for teens, He Forgot to Say Goodbye, won the Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award, the Southwest Book Award, and was named a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. For years, he directed the creative writing programme in the University of Texas, El Paso.
“The Mexican-American people have helped make this country great, and they have never been properly thanked.” @BorderPoet
Ep. 3: Angela Kocherga on the U.S.-Mexico Border
ANGELA KOCHERGA is an Emmy-award winning multimedia journalist living and working on the U.S.-Mexico border. She is a Staff Writer at the Albuquerque Journal. Of her life and work, Kocherga says,
I have spent my career as a journalist chronicling stories on both sides of the border that too often are about the conflicts that define the U.S.-Mexico relationship: immigration, contraband, crime.
In the midst of hardship, and heartache, I have witnessed people in their worst moments often at their best: brave, determined, resilient.
And in my reporting I often interview people who navigate two countries and cultures in extraordinary ways.
“Our stories are what bind us and help us understand each other.” @AKochergaBorder
Ep. 2: Garrett Carr on the Irish Border
GARRETT CARR is a writer and map-maker originally from Donegal. His book, The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border (Faber & Faber) chronicles his journey along the entirety of the Irish border, weaving history, memoir, maps, and photographs into a timely story. With Brexit and tensions in borderlands around the world, Carr offers a deeply knowledgeable perspective on the history - and possible futures - of the Irish borderlands.
“Brexit has done more for the possibility of a united Ireland than the IRA campaign ever came close to achieving.”
Read The Yellow Manifesto: A True Account of a Border and Its People.
Carr is Senior Lecturer in the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University Belfast. Read more about him and his work here.
*This episode features “St. John’s Well” from Benjamin Dwyer's imagines obesae et aspect ingratae, a piece for solo viola performed by Garth Knox (New Dublin Press, 2015).
Ep. 1: Annemarie Ní Churreáin
ANNEMARIE NÍ CHURREÁIN is a poet from North West Donegal living and working in Dublin. BLOODROOT is her debut collection.
Presenter Jonathan C. Creasy and Ní Churreáin discuss her upbringing in Donegal, her relationship with Dublin, her writing practice, and working in collaboration with other artists.
“There’s something really exciting about putting two people, or two art disciplines, or two voices together […] and seeing what comes out of that alchemy. I think of collaboration as a process of alchemy.”
