The first Over The Edge: Open Reading after the summer break takes place in Galway City Library on Thursday August 28, from 6.30pm to 8.00pm.
The featured readers are Australian poet Jane Williams, Mary McGill, and Majella Kelly, with an open mic afterwards. The evening will also see the announcement of the long list for this year’s Over The Edge New Writer of The Year competition, which received a very healthy number of entries again this year.
Majella Kelly is a native of Tuam and a graduate of UCC. She holds an MA in Modern Drama Studies from UCD. She teaches English, French, and Italian in St Colman's College, Claremorris, Mayo. She was shortlisted for the Cuirt New Writing Prize and The Fish Poetry Prize 2014. She just started writing in September 2013 when she signed up for a creative writing class with Susan Millar DuMars and is now a regular attendee at Kevin Higgins’ Tuesday Nights poetry workshop. Her first poem will be published in the Autumn issue of Skylight 47.
Mary McGill lives in Galway. Her fiction has appeared in The South Circular, The Bohemyth, Crannóg, and Wordlegs. In 2013, she was shortlisted for the Penguin / RTÉ Guide short story competition and the Irish Times ‘Legends of the Fall’ competition. Mary was also longlisted for the 2013 Over the Edge award and shortlisted for the 2014 RTÉ Radio One Francis MacManus Award.
Jane Williams was born in England in 1964 to an Irish father and Australian mother. She has lived all her adult life in Australia where her poetry has been widely published since the early 1990’s. Awards for her poetry include the Anne Elder Award for her first book outside temple boundaries, the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize, and the DJ O'Hearn Memorial Fellowship. She is co-editor of the new online literary magazine, Communion. Jane’s most recent collection of poems, Days Like These: New and selected poems 1998-2013, was published last year by Interactive Press.
The MC for the evening will be Susan Millar DuMars. For further details phone 087 6431748.
