Prairie Schooner to Host “Global Ireland” Panel Discussion and Reading Featuring Eamonn Wall, Drucilla Wall, and Ray McManus

 

Prairie Schooner, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s literary journal, is hosting a series of events promoting “Global Ireland” on Thursday, March 28.  The event will feature a panel discussion and a reading comprised of Irish and Irish-American poets that are both free and open to the public.  The poets featured are Eamonn Wall, Drucilla Wall, and Ray McManus. 

The Global Ireland panel will be held from 1-2 p.m. in the Dudley Bailey Library, located in Andrews Hall on the UNL City Campus. 

All three writers will participate in a poetry reading at 7:30 p.m. at the Great Plains Art Museum located in the Center for Great Plains Studies at 1155 Q Street. 

Eamonn Wall is the author of the poetry collections Sailing Lake Mareotis and A Tour of Your Country.  Wall has also pulished the scholarly and academic books Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions and From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills.  Wall is the director of the Irish Studies program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis where he teaches courses in Irish and British Literature. 

Drucilla Wall’s poetry collection The Geese at the Gates has received international attention, garnerning positive reviews from The Irish Times, The Galway Advertiser, and Western American Literature.  Wall’s work focuses on her relationship to Irish and American places with an environmental consciouness, while engaging with her Creek/Muscogee, Irish, and Jewish identity.

Ray McManus is the author of two books of poetry, Driving through the counry before you are born and Red Dirt Jesus.  McManus is also widely published in many notable literary journals such as Los Angeles Review, Natural Bridge, and Arkansas Review.  McManus is an assistant professor of English at the University of South Carolina Sumter.

Kwame Dawes, poet and Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner, noted the importance of hosting an event focused on writers of the Irish diaspora.  “This is a very exciting event, for given the contribution of Irish authors to world literature, it always makes sense to hear what contemporary poets with a clear Irish bent have to say.  I recently read Colum McCann reflecting on the challenges and rewards of writing from outside of Ireland—he mused that regardless of his locale, subject matter and characters, he finds himself always negotiating the meaning of Irishness and its relationship to the world.  Eamon Wall, Drucilla Wall and Ray McManus are each gifted poets in their own right and come at their art from distinctive perspectives.  This should prove a delicious event.”

Global Ireland is a part of Prairie Schooner’s larger global inititiave to promote and support writing on an international scale.  The Global Ireland event anticipates the release of Prairie Schooner’s mobile app release, Global Schooner, a map-based platform that allows users to explore the wide international breadth of authors who have published in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s prestigious literary journal during its 87-year history.