Opened Ground - American poets reflecting on Irish poems
Curated by Teri Cross Davis
In partnership with the Folger Shakespeare Library and Poetry Ireland
Featuring:
- Beth Ann Fennelly
- Francisco Aragón
- Jennifer Chang
- Charif Shanahan
This event took place on Thursday, April 28 • 4 PM ET
Free, online, donations welcome.
”Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,
Each verse returning like the plough turned round.”
— Seamus Heaney “Glanmore Sonnets”
For Poetry Day Ireland 2022, poets from across the U.S. read their favorite Irish verses in celebration of the reach and impact of Irish poetry, curated and led by poet Teri Cross Davis.
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union (The 2019 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize) and Haint (2017 Ohioana Poetry Award). She is the 2020 Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Prize winner and the poetry coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.
Beth Ann Fennelly
Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, is a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. She’s won grants and awards from the N.E.A., the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Beth Ann has published six books— three of poetry: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, all with W. W. Norton. Beth Ann's poetry has been in over fifty anthologies, including Best American Poetry 1996, 2005, and 2006, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Poets of the New Century, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and in textbooks such as Contemporary American Poetry and Literature.
Francisco Aragón
Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. He is the author of the three books of poetry, most recently After Rubén (Red Hen Press, 2020). Previous collections include Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press, 2010) and Puerta del Sol (Bilingual Press, 2005). He is also the editor of the award-winning anthology The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2007). His poetry has appeared in over twenty anthologies and a range of literary journals. He is a faculty member at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies where he directs Letras Latinas. He spends the fall semester on the Notre Dame campus, and spring and summer in Washington, D.C.
Jennifer Chang
Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including American Poetry Review, The Baffler, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry, and A Public Space, and her essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Literary History, The Volta, and elsewhere. She co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, an organization that supports Asian American writers, serves on the editorial board of Poetry Daily, and taught creative writing and literature at George Washington University in Washington, DC.
Charif Shanahan
Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and for the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco, among other awards and recognitions. Originally from the Bronx, Shanahan is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA and MA graduate creative writing programs.
