Gail McConnell (Ireland) read alongside Noel Monaghan for an event organised by the John Hewitt Society and City Chapters (Armagh) to celebrate 2019 National Poetry Day.
Gail lives in Belfast and is a Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast where she is also the convenor of the MA in Poetry: Creativity and Criticism at the Seamus Heaney Centre. Her debut pamphlet, “Fourteen,” was published by Green Bottle Press in 2018 and her second, “Fothermather,” was published by Ink Sweat & Tears in 2019. “Fothermather” was made into a programme for Radio 4 and the Seriously… podcast. It was a BBC Radio 4 Pick of the Week and one of The Observer’s Picks of the Week. Gail’s long poem, ‘Type Face’ (Blackbox Manifold 17, 2016) concerns her experience of reading a Historical Enquiries Team report about her father’s murder. Gail is the recipient of an ACES award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and has published poems in, amongst others, Poetry Review, PN Review, Stand, The Manchester Review and The Tangerine.
Gail is also the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Palgrave, 2014), which examines theology and form in the work Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, and she was Principal Investigator for ‘Listening to Voices: Creative Disruptions with the Hearing Voices Network’ funded by the AHRC (2015-16).