Cork International Poetry Festival Presents an Evening of Griffin Poetry

Ulrikka S. Gernes was born in Sweden to Danish parents. She has published eleven collections of poetry since her first at the age of eighteen. In English, Brick Books of Canada has published A Sudden Sky, Selected Poems (2001) and Frayed Opus for Strings & Wind Instruments, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2016. She lives in Copenhagen.

Canadian poet Karen Solie is the author of four poetry collections: Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, Pigeon (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, and the Trillium Poetry Prize), and The Road In Is Not The Same Road Out. Her The Living Option: Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2013. She received the 2015 Writers Trust Latner Poetry Prize, and the 2016 Canada Council Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for an artist in mid-career. Solie has taught for writing programmes and universities across Canada, and is an associate director for the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio and a Trustee of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.

Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950. Her first collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her second book, The Country Between Us (1981), won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her later collections include: The Angel of History (1994), and Blue Hour (2003). In the Lateness of the World is forthcoming. She serves as a Trustee of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.

Yusef Komunyakka‘s numerous collections of poetry include Taboo, Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, Warhorses, and most recently The Emperor of Water Clocks. He has been the recipient of awards including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry, and the Wallace Stevens Award, and was shortlisted for the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is currently the Poet Laureate of New York State and teaches at New York University.

Mark Doty is the author of nine books of poems, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, and Deep Lane, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2015. He has also published five volumes of nonfiction prose, is the first American to have won the T.S. Eliot Prize in the UK and his work has been honoured by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is a Trustee of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, teaches at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.

Michael Symmons Roberts was born in 1963 in Preston, Lancashire, UK. He has published six collections, which have garnered the Forward Prize, the Costa Poetry Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award, and been shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His collaboration with James MacMillan has led to two BBC Proms choral commissions, song cycles, music theatre works and operas. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. His Selected Poems appeared in 2016.

Jo Shapcott was born in London. Poems from her three award-winning collections, Electroplating the Baby, Phrase Book and My Life Asleep are gathered in selected poems, Her Book. She has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best Collection and the National Poetry Competition (twice). Tender Taxes, her version of Rilke, was published in 2001; Of Mutability won the Costa Book Award in 2010. In 2016, she joined the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry as a Trustee.

Marek Kazmierski was born and lives in Poland, although he spent most of his life in the UK, where he taught English and creative writing in a range of settings, including prisons and refugee centres. Until recently, he was Managing Editor of Not Shut Up, a quarterly magazine representing unfree art in the UK and abroad. His writing and translations have been published by the likes of 3AM Magazine, the Guardian, Poetry Wales and The White Review, while his short-form autobiography won the 2007 Penguin Decibel Prize. His translation of Wioletta Greg’s Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance was shortlisted for the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. He has worked with the Arts Council, British Council, English PEN, Paul Hamlyn Trust and Southbank Centre on various literary projects, lecturing on outsider arts and co-ordinating the eMigrating Landscapes academic research project at SSEES (University College London). In 2016, he joined the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry as a Trustee.