THREE POETS, all with a varied heritage who have lived in various parts of the globe will gather together in the Town Hall this month to read at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature.
Richard Tillinghast, Fred D’Aguiar, and Naomi Shihab Nye will read in the Town Hall on Wednesday April 21 at 6.30pm.
Tillinghast is a native of Memphis, Tennessee but has been living in Ireland for the past 20 years. He came first to Kinvara in 1990 on an Amy Lowell travel grant. He now lives in south Tipperary and is a distinctive presence on the Irish literary scene, having published 10 collections of his poetry. The Irish Times has praised his poems as “works of great beauty”.
Fred D’Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents and grew up in Guyana, returning to England when he was a teenager. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent. He is currently Professor of English and Gloria D Smith Professor Of African Studies at Virginia Tech State University.
He has published numerous collections of poetry, including Bill Of Rights (1998 ), which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. He has also written four novels, of which The Longest Memory (1994 ) won the Whitbread First Novel Award, and several plays.
Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet, songwriter, and novelist. She was born to a Palestinian father and American mother, considers San Antonio her home, but is also a self-confessed wanderer.
Nye began writing poems at the age of three. She was influenced by her mother, who read to her all the time. She graduated from Trinity University, San Antonio. She and her photographer husband Michael Nye have one son, Madison.
Her first collection of poems, Different Ways to Pray, explored the theme of similarities and differences between cultures, which would become one of her lifelong areas of focus. As well as poetry she writes books for teenagers, and she is also an essayist.
She has won four Pushcart Prizes, the Jane Addams Children’s Book award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and a 2000 Witter Bynner Fellowship. In June 2009, Nye was named as one of PeaceByPeace.com’s first peace heroes.
Tickets are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777.
