Afternoon Craft Conversation and Panel with Irish Poets

One of the most politically charged acts a people can do is read and write for themselves. Visiting Irish writers, including Leanne O’Sullivan, will share one poem and their ruminations on a panel that explores the displays of power and violence in myth and beyond it.  In this conversation, O’Sullivan will explicitly respond to selections from Hannah Arendt’s essay “On Violence” in her work and in her reading of the contemporary moment.  Conversation facilitated by Rosemary Graham.

Leanne O’Sullivan was born in 1983, and comes from the Beara peninsula in West Cork. She received an MA in English in 2006 from University College, Cork, where she now teaches. The winner of several of Ireland’s poetry competitions in her early 20s (including the Seacat, Davoren Hanna and RTE Rattlebag Poetry Slam), she has published four collections, all from Bloodaxe, Waiting for My Clothes (2004), Cailleach: The Hag of Beara (2009), winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2010, The Mining Road (2013) and A Quarter of an Hour (2018). She was given the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award in 2009 and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry in 2011, and received a UCC Alumni Award in 2012. Her work has been included in various anthologies, including Selina Guinness’s The New Irish Poets(Bloodaxe Books, 2004) and Billy Collins’s Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry(Random House, 2003). Residencies and festival readings have taken her to France, India, China and America, amongst other locations.

Sponsored by: Collegiate Seminar and the Informal Seminar Seminar Curriculum, January Term, the College Committee on Inclusive Excellence, Ó Bhéal (Cork, Ireland), the Cork Arts Council, the Kalmanovitz School of Education, The English Department, the MFA in Creative Writing, and the Los Gatos Irish Writers Festival