Photo of Eavan Boland courtesy of Maura Hickey
Hosted by poet Shara Lessley, editor of “The Door Left Wide: Irish Poets in Tribute to Eavan Boland” (NER 44.2), this special virtual event, in partnership with the Vermont Studio Center, will honor the life and legacy of Eavan Boland. Drawing on Boland’s enduring vision, presenters will share their writing, as well as memories of Eavan as a poet, editor, and mentor. Additionally, scholar-biographer Jody Allen Randolph will give a brief presentation on Boland’s early emergence as a writer in Ireland, her formidable influence, and their ongoing conversations about the art.
To register, please submit this form. A private Zoom link will be provided.
From left to right: Tara Bergin, Shara Lessley, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Molly Twomey
Eavan Boland (1944-2020) was the author of more than a dozen award-winning volumes of poetry, including The Historians, Outside History, In a Time of Violence, Against Love Poetry, and Domestic Violence, among others, as well as several volumes of nonfiction such as A Journey with Two Maps and Object Lessons. Coeditor of the anthology The Making of Poem, Boland was born in Dublin and considered one of the foremost female voices in Irish literature. She received a Lannan Foundation Award and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and taught at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College, and at Stanford University, where she was the Director of the Creative Writing Program. Former editor of Poetry Ireland, she was an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Irish Academy of Letters. In 2017, Boland received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Irish Book Awards–
Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife, winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, and Two-Headed Nightingale, as well as coeditor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, an anthology of essays. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, Shara has been awarded an NEA, Washington College’s Mary Wood Fellowship, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, and a Discovery/The Nation prize, among others. Shara’s recent work appears in American Poetry Review, Magma, Kenyon Review, IMAGE, and the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. A Consulting Editor for Acre Books, Shara is Editor-at-Large / Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor at West Branch.
Jody Allen Randolph‘s edited collection of Eavan Boland’s prose, Citizen Poet: New and Selected Essays, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton and Carcanet Press.
Tara Bergin was born and grew up in Dublin. Her first collection of poems, This Is Yarrow, was awarded the 2014 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize and the 2014 Shine/Strong Award for best first collection by an Irish author. Her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Her third book is Savage Tales, published by Carcanet in 2022. Tara now lives in the North of England and teaches part-time in the creative writing programme at Newcastle University.
Pádraig Ó Tuama is the host of On Being’s Poetry Unbound—a podcast that has gained over 10 million downloads since its start in 2020—and also the author of Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your Life. Profiled by the New Yorker, published in Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry Ireland, and many others, he brings interests in conflict, language, religion, and power to his work. His most recent collection is Feed the Beast (Broken Sleep Books, 2022).
Molly Twomey grew up in Lismore, County Waterford, and graduated in 2019 with an MA in Creative Writing from University College Cork. She runs an online international poetry event, Just to Say, sponsored by Jacar Press. In 2021, she was chosen for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series and awarded an Arts Council Literature Bursary. Her debut collection, Raised Among Vultures, was published in May 2022 with The Gallery Press.