GALWAY: Over The Edge Writer's Gathering

Friday, September 10th, 2010, 8pm
Café 8 @ The Museum,
Spanish Arch,
Galway

The Over The Edge September Writers’ Gathering presents readings by poets from Ireland, the UK and Australia.

Jean O’Brien, James Byrne, Niall McDevitt and Geoff Page will read their work. The evening will also see the launch of Behind The Masks, a collection of work by the Advanced Poetry Workshop at Galway Arts Centre, co-edited by Marie Cadden, Denise Garvey, Nicki Griffin & Tom Lavelle.

Jean O'Brien is a Dubliner now living in the Midlands. She has published three collections of poetry, The Shadow Keeper (Salmon, 1997), Dangerous Dresses (Bradshaw Books, 2005) & Lovely Legs (Salmon Poetry, 2009). She facilitates creative writing classes for venues as diverse as the Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin City Council and Mountjoy and Limerick Prisons. She was Writer-in-Residence for Co. Laois in 2005 and received Fish International Poetry Award in 2008. Her poetry was described by Fiona Sampson in the Irish Times as “effortless writing, graceful and exact as any pirouette in its insight”.

James Byrne is the Editor and co-founder of The Wolf poetry magazine. His debut collection, Passages of Time, was published by Flipped Eye in 2003. Blood / Sugar his second collection was published recently by Arc. He is the co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, an anthology of British and Irish poets under 35, published by Bloodaxe in 2009, and the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees, forthcoming from Carcanet in 2011. In 2008 he won the Treci Trg poetry prize in Serbia. As a result his Selected Poems was published (in a bilingual edition) in Belgrade in 2009. Since 2006 James has taught the regular Wolf Workshops, which have helped many students with first book and pamphlet publications. He was born in 1977 and lives in London and New York.

Niall McDevitt is an Irish poet based in London. He has worked as an actor/ mus
ician in Neil Oram’s 24-hour play The Warp, Ken Campbell’s Pidgin Macbeth, and John ‘Crow’ Constable’s The Southwark Mysteries. For radio, he was resident Pidgin poet/translator on John Peel’s Home Truths. As an activist, McDevitt has campaigned to secure the future of the Rimbaud/Verlaine House at 8 Royal College Street, and for the release of poet Saw Wai from Insein prison in Burma. His poetry collection ‘b/w’ was published this year by Waterloo Press. Fans of his poetry include such luminaries as Patti Smith and John Cooper Clarke.

Geoff Page is an Australian poet who has published eighteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, four verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. He retired at the end of 2001 from being in charge of the English Department at Narrabundah College, a position he had held since 1974. He has won several awards, including the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry and the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award. Selections from his work have been translated into Chinese, Hindi, German, Serbian, Slovenian and Greek. Geoff is delighted to be returning to Galway having previously read for Over The Edge in 2007.

Behind The Masks is a collection of poems by participants in the renowned Thursday afternoon Advanced Poetry Workshop at Galway Arts Centre. The poems are accompanied by a foreword by Galway City Council’s Arts Officer, James Harrold, and a thought provoking introductory essay by co-editors, Marie Cadden, Denise Garvey, Nicki Griffin & Tom Lavelle.

There is no entrance fee. Café 8 @ The Museum has a wine licence. All welcome. For further information contact 087-6431748.