I want(ed) to explore the places where nature, the body, and something beyond the body, meld together, speak to each other or of each other. Where does matter come from? Where does the physical world start, and where does something beyond the physical, observable world begin? – SH

In this very special evening of poetry and conversation, award-winning poets, Seán Hewitt and Victoria Kennefick, will read their work in discussion with host, Catherine Gander. Both poets are engaged in work that gives voice to the transitional, liminal moments in our lives, our bodies. To consider the possibility that identity - fluid and without border, ever evolving - finds its freedom, its expression within the space of the poem - a freedom that is not available elsewhere. Please join us as we consider journeys of concealment and revelation, the poetry of rupture and of rapture.

Catherine Gander is an academic, critic, and poet. Her most recent publications are Matches (Verve Poetry Press, 2024), and The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). She is Associate Professor in the English Department of Maynooth University.

Seán Hewitt is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire (Jonathan Cape, 2020), which won The Laurel Prize, and Rapture's Road (Jonathan Cape, 2024). His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (Jonathan Cape, 2022), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Victoria Kennefick's debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the Butler Literary Prize. A UCD/Arts Council of Ireland Writer-in-Residence 2023 and Poet-in-Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo 2022-2023, Victoria is now Cork County Council Writer-in-Residence 2024. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) was a PBS Choice for Spring 2024 and BBC Poetry Extra Book of the Month for March.