Sinead Morrissey, a Northern Irish poet whose work has been internationally acclaimed for more than two decades, will give a free public reading April 4 at 7 p.m. in the Seney-Stovall Chapel at 200 N. Milledge Ave.
The event is sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts as part of its 2018 Global Georgia Initiative, in partnership with the department of English, the Creative Writing Program and Emory University.
Morrissey, who in 2013-2014 served as the first poet laureate of Belfast, has published six collections of poetry including 2013’s Parallax, which won both the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the Irish Times Poetry Prize, and 2017’s On Balance, which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Parallax was included in Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks, edited by Fintan O’Toole in 2016, as the most important work by any Irish artist for the year 2013.
“Her relationship to the past is much more complex than any direct reckoning with the legacy of Northern Ireland’s recent violence,” O’Toole wrote. “A much larger past seems to crowd in on her, history’s lost people demanding recognition of their humanity.”
Morrissey is a professor of creative writing and director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts at Newcastle University.
Joining Morrissey will be LeAnne Howe, a poet, playwright, novelist, filmmaker and scholar who is the Eidson Distinguished Professor in American Literature in the English department of UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. Howe, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, was the inaugural recipient of the Modern Languages Association Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages in 2014.
More information is available at willson.uga.edu.
