Apply for mentorships in poetry, fiction & memoir

David McLoghlin is a writer of memoir and creative nonfiction and a poet. He has mentored in memoir and creative nonfiction for The National Mentoring Programme and taught memoir workshops extensively for The Irish Writers Centre, The Center For Fiction, Hudson Valley Writers Center and The Shipman Agency. He also facilitates life writing workshops via Cork County Council and Cork Libraries, as well as independently via Zoom. His third book, Crash Centre, was shortlisted for the 2025 Pigott Prize in association with Listowel Writers’ Week. He has received fellowships from The Sewanee Writers Conference and New York University, where he was an MFA candidate, and a major Arts Council Literature Bursary for a memoir project. His essays have been commissioned for Poetry Foundation’s website, and published in New Hibernia Review, University of Michigan Press (forthcoming) and anthologised in Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets on Poetry, Influences, and Writing in America (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and Distant Summers: Remembering Philip Casey (Arlen House, 2024). An immersive essay about playing, as a novice, a golf course designed by his grandfather, Eddie Hackett, “the father of Irish golf design” is forthcoming from Golfer’s Journal in the USA. He is at work on a memoir and a fourth collection of poetry.

Afric McGlinchey has published three collections, two chapbooks and a memoir. Most recent is À la belle étoile (Salmon Poetry, 2025), which received an Agility Award. Her prose-poetry memoir, Tied to the Wind (Broken Sleep Books, 2021) has been described by one reviewer as ‘such an incredibly moving experience I would prefer to be writing a thesis on the work’. Three of her books have been translated: two into Italian and one into Macedonian. Recognised with numerous awards—including a Hennessy poetry award, two Arts Council literature bursaries and an Irish Writers Centre residency—she has been published in many international journals, and invited to festivals from Rome to Durban.  A mentor with the Munster Literature and an experienced workshop facilitator, she also writes widely as a reviewer. Afric lives in West Cork.

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.