Gathering in a Field: About Poetry Anthologies

Join us for a conversation about poetry anthologies to query: 

• What makes a ‘good’ anthology?
• What is an anthology’s scope?
• How can anthologies broaden the field of literature? 

You might be a writer interested in how anthologies can influence beyond the status quo or impact upon your career; or an editor interested in the practicalities of taking an anthology from initial idea to publication. Event panellists include seasoned and emerging editors with wide-ranging perspectives and experience. With Ruth Carr, Alan Hayes, Chris Agee, Manuela Moser and Mícheál McCann.

About the Panellists 

Mícheál McCann is a poet from Derry. His poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review and bath magg. Kei Miller named him as one of ten unmissable emerging writers in the U.K. for the International Literature Showcase 2021. A pamphlet of poems, Keeper, is forthcoming from 14publishing in August 2022.

Alan Hayes is Editor and Publisher of Arlen House, Ireland's oldest publisher specialising in equality and diversity. He has published over 300 books so far, many supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Foras na Gaeilge. Among his books are The Irish Women’s History Reader (Routledge, 2001); Reading the Future: New Writing from Ireland (Hodges Figgis, 2017) and Washing Windows Too: Irish Women Write Poetry (Arlen House, 2022) which reached number 3 in the bestseller charts. He co-founded Dublin UNESCO City of Literature and served on its management board for a decade.

Manuela Moser is a writer, editor and event programmer based in Belfast. She is the co-founder and editor of The Lifeboat Press (est. 2015) and was the inaugural Publishing Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast. Her poetry has been published in The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review, Hotel, Copper Nickel and The Tangerine among other publications. In 2020 she completed an AHRC funded PhD at the Seamus Heaney Centre in creative and critical writing, and also was awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Travel Award. 

Chris Agee was born in San Francisco and grew up in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. After high school at Phillips Academy Andover and a year in Aix-en-Provence, France, he attended Harvard University and since graduation has lived in Ireland. His third collection of poems, Next to Nothing, was shortlisted in Britain for the 2009 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and its sequel, Blue Sandbar Moon, appeared in 2018. He is the Editor of Irish Pages, and recently co-edited Balkan Essays, the sixth volume of Hubert Butler’s essays. 

Ruth Carr has worked mostly as a tutor in community and adult education and co-edited the poetry magazine, The Honest Ulsterman for about 14 years. She has edited and co-edited a variety of anthologies, from The Female Linein 1985 which challenged the very clear imbalance of female to male published writers of poetry, fiction and drama at that time, to Her Other Language in 2020 in which Northern Irish women writers address domestic violence and abuse.  She also edited a section of the mammoth Field Day IV anthology and various anthologies by community writing groups, by women actively involved in the civil conflict and collections by Open Arts and Crescent Arts Creative Learning students. She has three collections of poetry, There is a House, The Airing Cupboard and Feather and Bone.