GALWAY: March Over The Edge Open Reading

Thursday, March 29th, 2012, 6.30pm-8pm, FREE
Galway City Library

Featured readers are Stephanie Klapp, Rejini Samuel and Paul Maddern.

Paul Maddern was born in Bermuda and lives in Co. Down. A winner in the 2009 Templar Poetry Pamphlet Competition, with Kelpdings, his ensuing collection, The Beachcomber’s Report (Templar, 2010) was shortlisted for the 2011 Eithne Strong Award. For his PhD at Queen’s University Belfast, he created the Seamus Heaney Centre Digital Archive, an online resource housing recordings of writers reading their work in public. Paul is currently Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Leeds.

Rejini Samuel was born and brought up in Nigeria where her Indian parents were secondary school teachers. She came to study in Galway in 1984. She is an Irish citizen and now considers herself almost Irish as well as almost Indian. Rejini was short-listed for the 2011 Over the Edge ‘New Writer of the Year Competition’ and she was the only entrant to have both her fiction and her poetry long-listed for the Doire Press ‘1st Annual International Fiction and Poetry Chapbook Competition’ in January 2012;‘Vision Painter’ went on to be short-listed in the fiction category. Under her pen name R J Samuel, she has published her first novel Heart Stopper in digital format and in hard copy on CreateSpace. She is currently working on her second novel Falling Colours. Her story 'Flowers in the Fountain' has been long listed for the Multi Story (UK) Flash Fiction competition and another, 'The Meal', got an Honourable Mention. Her poem 'Robes' was recently long listed for the Fish Poetry Prize.

Stephanie Klapp was born and reared in Kassel, Germany. She studied German and English at Kassel and Heidelberg Universities 1997-1998 and moved to Galway in summer of 1998. In 2009, she completed an MA in Culture and Colonialism at NUIG, with a thesis on colonial representations and gender roles in the Victorian adventure novel. She is currently working as a German and History teacher in a girls’ secondary school in Killiney, Dublin. Stephanie has been writing since childhood, and in 1995 she sold her first short-story to German teenage magazine BRAVO. She started workshops with Susan Millar DuMars in February 2010 at Galway Arts Centre, where she has also participated in poetry workshops facilitated by Kevin Higgins. Stephanie was long-listed for the Over the Edge New Writer of The Year award in both 2010 and 2011.

As usual there will be an open-mic after the Featured Readers have finished. New readers are always most welcome. The MC for the evening will be Susan Millar DuMars. For further details phone 087-6431748.

Over The Edge acknowledges the ongoing generous financial support of Galway City Council & The Arts Council. http://overtheedgeliteraryevents.blogspot.com