The College of Staten Island Schwerner Writer’s Series presents Sinéad Morrissey and Jane Springer on Tuesday, May 12 in the Center for the Arts Screening Room (Building 1P, Room 226) from 2:30pm to 3:30pm.
Sinéad Morrissey was born in Portadown, Northern Ireland in 1972, and has been writing poetry from a very early age. In 1990, she became the youngest poet ever to receive the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry, and has since been honored with numerous other awards, among them the Michael Hartnett Award for Poetry. Her five collections are There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009) and the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning Parallax (2013), all of which are published by Carcanet Press. She has lived in Germany, Japan, and New Zealand and now lectures in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast. She is Belfast’s inaugural Poet Laureate.
Jane Springer earned a PhD at Florida State University. Her debut poetry collection, Dear Blackbird (2007), won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize from the University of Utah Press. Her second collection, Murder Ballad (2012), received the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. Influenced by Flannery O’Connor and Larry Levis, Springer writes narrative, often long-form poems that portray rural Southern life as at once mythic and passionate. Poet Lynnell Edwards, reviewing Murder Ballad, noted, “Springer’s long line is fearless in its music, indulging luscious sounds and pounding measures. Traversing the despair of the rural south, [she] exploits the urgency and dread of every keening murder ballad, showing how that cleaving is both our undoing and our salvation.”
