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David McLoghlin is the author of Crash Centre (May 2024), Waiting for Saint Brendan and Other Poems and Santiago Sketches, all from Salmon Poetry. His work has appeared widely in literary magazines of note in Ireland and the USA and been broadcast on WNYC’s Radiolab. A Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship Recipient in 2023, he was awarded second prize in the Patrick Kavanagh Awards (2008), won the Open category in the 2018 Voices of War International Poetry Competition and received a major Literature Bursary from The Arts Council. His writing has been anthologised, most recently in Distant Summers: Remembering Philip Casey (Arlen House, 2024) and Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing (Penguin Random House, 2020). He was a Teaching Fellow at New York University’s Creative Writing Programme, and Resident Writer at Hunts Point Alliance for Children in the South Bronx. He has taught literature and creative writing at NYU, UCD, the American College, Dublin and UCD’s innovative Poetry as Commemoration project, and read his work and taught at festivals like West Cork Literature Festival, The Sunken Garden Poetry Festival (USA), and Cork International Poetry Festival. He has facilitated creative writing in the community via The Unfinished Book of Poetry, Culture Night, Cruinniú na nÓg, and currently teaches via The Heritage Council, Poetry Ireland’s Writers in Schools and The Center for Fiction (New York). www.davidmcloghlin.com

Afric McGlinchey is an Irish poet and reviewer with strong African connections, as she spent her childhood and early adulthood in Southern Africa. Selected by Poetry Ireland Review as one of The Rising Generation (2016), her other honours include a Hennessy poetry award, Poets Meet Politics award, Northern Liberties prize (USA), and Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations. She has been the recipient of several bursaries from the Cork County Council and was Writer in Residence at the Uillinn Arts Centre in 2016. Since 2005, Afric has been facilitating creative writing and poetry workshops. She is a reviewer for the Dublin Review of Books and other journals, and works as a consulting book editor for The Inkwell Group. Her début poetry collection, The lucky star of hidden things, was published by Salmon Poetry, followed by Ghost of the Fisher Cat in 2016. Both collections have been well-received, translated into Italian and re-published by L’Arcolaio. A surrealist chapbook, Invisible Insane, was published by SurVision in 2019. She was awarded a Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland to write Tied to the Wind, an auto-fictional prose poetry collection, published by from Broken Sleep Books. www.africmcglinchey.com

Billy O’Callaghan was born in Cork in 1974, and is the author of four short story collections: In Exile (2008, Mercier Press), In Too Deep (2009, Mercier Press), The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind (2013, New Island Books, winner of a 2013 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award and selected as Cork’s One City, One Book for 2017), and The Boatman (2020, Jonathan Cape and Harper (U.S.A.), as well as the novels The Dead House (2017, Brandon/O’Brien Press and 2018, Arcade/Skyhorse (USA) and My Coney Island Baby, (2019, Jonathan Cape and Harper (U.S.A.). His latest novel, Life Sentences, was published by Jonathan Cape in January 2021. Billy is the winner of a Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award for the short story, and twice a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Bursary Award for Literature. Among numerous other honours, his story, The Boatman, was a finalist for the 2016 Costa Short Story Award.

Patrick Cotter has published several chapbooks and four full collections of poetry, most recently, Sonic White Poise (2021) and Quality Control at the Miracle Factory (2025) both with the Dedalus Press. He has edited many poetry journals, including guest-edited in 2015 a special issue of POETRY on young Irish poets. His poems have appeared in the Financial Times, London Review of Books, POETRY, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, the Stinging Fly and many other places. He has been curating poetry events since 1985 and has a contributor and a subject of many poetry podcasts.