In this salon-style event, Poet-in-Residence Susanna Galbraith will be joined by Belfast-based poets Shannon Kuta Kelly and Matthew Rice. The session will include readings and conversations around the making and editing of their recent collections, slight forms, cumulative meaning, and where poetry’s attention meets environment, narrative and transformation. 

The Tree Is Missing (Faber, 2026) by Shannon Kuta Kelly explores ‘the poetics of the border’, identity and storytelling with a ‘restless immediacy’. 

plastic (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025) by Matthew Rice is a book-length poem in time-stamped parts ‘exploring the life of the night-shift industrial worker turned poet’. 

morsels (Macha Press, 2025) by Susanna Galbraith ‘explores the ways language and its absences shape our relationships with one another and our environments’.

Meet the poets

Susanna Galbraith is from Belfast. She won the Red Line Book Festival Poetry Competition 2021, was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions 2023 and New Voices: North 2025, and is Belfast Book Festival Poet in Residence 2026. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Propel and others, and her essays in Source Photographic Review, HU and Stories of TULCA. Her first book morsels was published by Macha Press in 2025.

Shannon Kuta Kelly is the author of The Tree is Missing (Faber, 2026). She holds a PhD from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University Belfast, where she served as Ciaran Carson Fellow. She is a founder and editor at Macha Press. The US edition of her book is forthcoming publication with McSweeney's in 2027.

Matthew Rice was born in Belfast. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer (2021), published by Summer Palace Press, was an Arts Council of Northern Ireland top ten books of the year pick. He holds an MA and a PhD from Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow for 2026 at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. His new book is plastic (2026), published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK/EU) and Soft Skull Press (US). plastic was included on the American Booksellers Association Indie Next List for January of this year, selected by independent booksellers across North America.