Queer Connections: Toby Buckley, Mary Montague & Leeanne Quinn

Join us for poetry readings that celebrates the growing connections between different queer writers across generations.

Three various and memorable poets – Leeanne Quinn, author of Some Lives (Dedalus Press), Toby Buckley, author of Milk Snake (Emma Press) and Mary Montague, author of Tribe (Dedalus) – will consider a poet they admire from a different generation, and how their work can speak across time and experience.

With the welcome explosion of queer publishing, this event celebrates intergenerational relationships between queer writers.

Joining the panel will be three guest speakers: Niamh McNally, Paul Maddern and William Keohane.

Toby Buckley is an archivist and writer from Donegal, currently based in Belfast. He completed his MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast as the first recipient of the Ruth West Poetry Award Scholarship. His work has appeared in numerous literary publications including Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Channel Magazine and the Doire Press anthology, Empty House (2021). His first pamphlet of poems, Milk Snake, was published by The Emma Press.

Mary Montague is a biologist by background, with a PhD in ornithology. Her collections are Tribe (Dedalus 2008) and Black Wolf on a White Plain (Summer Palace 2001). Her poems have been included in number of of anthologies, including Queering the Green (ed. Paul Maddern, Lifeboat 2021), and have been translated into French, Italian and Russian. She was a 2019 recipient of a Poetry Ireland Tyrone Guthrie Centre Mid-career Bursary. She contributes to The Guardian’s Country Diary.

Leeanne Quinn was born in Drogheda and grew up there and in Monasterboice, Co. Louth. Her debut collection of poetry, Before You, was published by Dedalus Press in 2012 and highly commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2013. Her second collection, Some Lives, was published in 2020 and noted as a Book of the Year by The Irish Times and The Irish Independent. She is the recipient of three Arts Council Bursary awards, most recently in 2021. Her poems have been widely anthologised, appearing in The Forward Book of Poetry 2013, Windharp: Poems of Ireland Since 1916, and Queering The Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry. In 2022 she co-edited Romance Options (Dedalus Press), an anthology of contemporary love poems from Ireland. She lives in Vienna.

Niamh McNally is a Belfast-based poet. She co-created/was a poetry editor for The Paperclip; a literary publication in Ulster University. Niamh is a workshop facilitator in The Seamus Heaney Homeplace and has been published in, The Tulsa Review, Tír na nÓg, The Galway Review, Aôthen Magazine, and HOWL: New Irish Writing. She has written for Bushmills, and has made two climate crisis films. Her first, solo publication New Impressions was published by The John Hewitt Society in 2023.

Paul Maddern (born Bermuda) has four publications with Templar Poetry, the latest being The Tipping Line (2018), and in 2021 he edited Queering the Green (Lifeboat Press). He has taught at the Seamus Heaney Centre and Leeds University, and now operates The River Mill Writers Retreat in Co Down.

William Keohane is a writer from Limerick. His essays have been published in British GQ, Banshee, The Stinging Fly, and The Tangerine. He is the author of Son, published by The Lifeboat Press (2023), and is the current writer-in-residence at Ormston House.