A quartet of highly regarded poets and writers will star at the next Poetry Lobby, supported by Poetry Ireland, taking place in the Menlo Park Hotel on Sunday week, November 23, from 3pm to 5pm.

They are Lorna Shaughnessy, Maurice Devitt, Emily Cullen and Karen J McDonnell and the event will again be hosted by local poet Anne Donnellan, followed, as usual, by an open mic.

Poet, translator and editor Lorna Shaughnessy has published five books of poetry, including Lark Water (Salmon Poetry, 2021); she has translated four collections of Mexican and Spanish poetry, and co-edited A Different Eden; Ecopoetry from Ireland and Galicia (Dedalus 2021). She is a co-founding editor of Macha Press.

Maurice Devitt is a past winner of the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland and Poems for Patience competitions. He published his debut collection, ‘Growing Up in Colour’, with Doire Press in 2018. Curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site, his Pushcart-nominated poem, The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work, was the title poem of an anthology published by Hibernian Writers in 2015. His second collection, Some of These Stories are True, was published by Doire in 2023.

Emily Cullen is the Meskell Poet in Residence at the University of Limerick, where she teaches Creative Writing and English. She has published three collections: Conditional Perfect (Doire Press, 2019), In Between Angels and Animals (Arlen House, 2013) and No Vague Utopia (Ainnir Publishing, 2003). Conditional Perfect was included in The Irish Times’ ‘best new poetry of 2019’.

Karen J McDonnell’s writing has been published widely. Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, she has received bursaries, writers’ residencies and been shortlisted for Irish Poem of the Year.

She has has read at festivals and on radio, including on RTÉ’s Sunday Miscellany. Her first collection, This Little World, was published by Doire Press.

Pictured: Lorna Shaughnessy