Tess Gallagher (USA/Ireland) read at the 2015 John Hewitt International Summer School, alongside Anne-Marie Fyfe.
Tess Gallagher was born in Port Angeles, Washington. A poet, essayist, fiction writer and playwright, her many honours include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts award, and a Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award. She has published numerous poetry collections with Graywolf Press(USA) the latest being Is, Is Not (2019). In Britain, she is published by Bloodaxe.
Tess has published three collections of short stories: The Lover of Horses (1986), At the Owl Woman Saloon (1997) and The Man from Kinvara: Selected Stories (2009), plus two collections of essays: A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry (1986) and Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray (2000). Tess co-authored two screenplays with her husband Raymond Carver and later advised on Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts, based on Carver’s work and collaborated with the late Irish storyteller Josie Gray on Barnacle Soup (Blackstaff, 2007). She lectures for the Whidby Island Writers Workshop MFA in Washington State. In May 2013 she hosted a Raymond Carver Festival on the Olympic Peninsula where she lived with him until his death in 1988. She spends part of each year in the West of Ireland, near Sligo.