Vona Groarke

Vona Groarke is a leading Irish poet.

She has published fourteen books, including eight collections of poetry with the Gallery Press: Shale (1994), Other People's Houses (1999), Flight (2002), Juniper Street (2006), Spindrift (2009), X (2014), Double Negative (2019), and Link : Poet and World (2021).^[1] She is also the author of a translation of the eighteenth-century Irish poem, Lament for Art O'Leary (Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire) (Gallery Books, 2008).^[2] and of Woman of Winter (2023), a version of the ninth-century Irish poem usually known as 'The Lament of the Hag of Beare', with illustrations by Isobel Nolan. Selected Poems was published in 2016 and won the Pigott Prize for Best Irish Poetry Collection. Her book-length essay on art frames and much else, Four Sides Full, was also published in 2016.

In 2022 New York University Press published Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara, an innovative, mixed-genre account of Irish women immigrants in late nineteenth-century New York, and their lives and work as domestic servants. With poetry, prose, history and images, Hereafter arose out of her time as a Fellow of the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, 2018–19.

A previous Editor of Poetry Ireland Review (issues 113–120, with best-selling special issues on Seamus Heaney, W.B. Yeats and the Rising Generation of Irish poets), she has also been a Selector for the Poetry Book Society in the U.K., a judge of the Forward Prizes, the Pollard Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award, as well as a poetry reviewer for the Irish Times. Recent essays on poets and poetry have appeared in the L.A. Review of Books, The Poetry Review, P.N. Review, and Poetry Ireland Review. Groarke has been a co-holder of the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University and has taught at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She has taught at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester since 2007,^[3] and in 2010 was elected a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of the arts. She is the current Poet in Residence with the Yeats Society in Sligo, and Writer in Residence at St John's College, Cambridge.

Awards and honours

Groarke's work has been recognized with awards including the Brendan Behan Memorial Award,^[4] the Hennessy Award,^[4] the Michael Hartnett Award,^[3] and the Strokestown International Poetry Award.^[4] Her volumes Spindrift, 'X', and 'Double Negative' have all been nominated for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.^[1] Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara was shortlisted for the Irish Independent / Yeats Society Poetry Prize 2023.

Books

1994: Shale, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle
1999: Other People's Houses, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle
2002: The Deserted Village (Introduction to Oliver Goldsmith poem, with drawings by Blaise Drummond)
2002: Flight, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle
2004: Flight and Earlier Poems, Wake Forest University Press, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, United States
2006: Juniper Street, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle; Wake Forest University Press, Winston-Salem, NC
2008: Lament for Art O'Leary, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle
2009: Spindrift, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle; Wake Forest University Press, Winston-Salem, NC,2010
2014: X, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle
2016: Selected Poems, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle
2016: Four Sides Full, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle
2019: Double Negative, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle
2021: Link : Poet and World, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle
2022: Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara, NYU Press, New York, NY, 10003
2023: Woman of Winter, The Gallery Press, Oldcastle