Mairtín Crawford Award: Preparing Poetry For Submission - Zoom Workshop

Ahead of the Mairtín Crawford Award submission window closing on the 9 April, join judges of the Poetry Award for a workshop for poets seeking advice, guidance and practical approaches to assembling and presenting poetry for submission.

Join judges of the 8th Poetry Award Kathleen McCracken and Dawn Watson will speak broadly about their own experiences of Awards – as writers and judges; the specificities of the Mairtín Crawford Award and practical approaches. Expect a lively conversation! 

This workshop will be online. Registration is required is receive the Zoom link. 

Traditionally the Award workshops been free. You can absolutely still sign up with no cost attached; but if you’d like to make a contribution to Crescent activity – as sometimes we get asked about - you’d be very welcome to. 

We shall also be running an in-person workshop - places are very limited so we recommend early booking. Click here for more information.

About the judges

Kathleen McCracken is the author of eight collections of poetry including Blue Light, Bay and College, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry, and a bilingual English/Portuguese edition entitled Double Self Portrait with Mirror: New and Selected Poems. She was a finalist for the WB Yeats Society of New York Poetry Competition, the Montreal International Prize for Poetry, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and the CBC Poetry Prize. In 2019 she won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. She has held several Ontario Arts Council awards and an Individual Artist Award from the Northern Ireland Arts Council. Her poems have appeared in The Malahat Review, Poetry Canada Review, Exile Quarterly, Poetry Ireland, The Shop, The Belfield Literary Review, New Orleans Review and Grain, and she has given readings in Canada, Ireland, Portugal, Brazil, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Dawn Watson is the author of We Play Here (Granta Poetry) – a Guardian Poetry Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize 2024 and the John Pollard International Poetry Prize for outstanding debut. The book was described as an “extraordinary, game-changing narrative long poem” by Luke Kennard. Dawn’s pamphlet The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher is published by The Emma Press. She completed a PhD in poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre in 2022. Dawn writes essays and short stories for BBC Radio 4, and her poetry and prose appear in leading journals such as Granta and The Poetry Review. She is the recipient of an ACES award and a General Arts Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Dawn is a former journalist and is currently a lecturer in poetry and prose at Queen’s University, Belfast.