Passages: Three Poets Navigate Unease

Join Ruth Carr for an afternoon poetry reading event, with discussion, that will chart the imaginative paths cut by three Northern Irish poets through personal, societal and environmental territories:  

Stephanie Conn with her third collection Off-kilter, and debut collections from Geraldine O’Kane with Unsafe and Teresa Godfrey, This, Also, is Mercy. 

Join Ruth to celebrate these intrepid collections from three of Ireland’s independent presses.

Stephanie Conn is an award winning poet whose poetry has been widely published. Her poetry collections The Woman on the Other Side (2016) and Island (2018) are published by Doire Press. Her pamphlet Copeland’s Daughter (2016) is published by Smith/Doorstep. She is currently a PhD researcher at Ulster University researching the poetry of chronic illness. 

Geraldine O’Kane is a poet, creative writing facilitator and mental health advocate. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies, journals and zines.  Geraldine is co-host and regular reader at the Purely Poetry open mic nights in Belfast. She has also curated two multi-platform exhibitions (Poetic Perspective and Product of Perception). She is supported by Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Big Lottery Fund, and University of Atypical. She is working towards her second poetry collection and on a Young Adults play with music set in 90s Northern Ireland. 

Teresa Godfrey is a poet, prose fiction writer, scriptwriter, artist, and a lover of the sea and long forest walks. Her writing has won awards, such as the EU New Talent Award for a screenplay adaptation of Ann Pilling’s book, Black Harvest, and her stories and poems have been published in various anthologies and literary magazines including Rhythm of Hearts, Crannog, Corncrake, and The Honest Ulsterman and broadcast on local radio.

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 Line in 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.