Poetry Reading: Leontia Flynn, Erika Meitner and Scott McKendry

Leontia Flynn first book These Days (Jonathan Cape, 2004) won the Forward prize for best First Collection, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, and the same year Leontia Flynn was named one of twenty ‘Next Generation’ poets by the Poetry Book Society in association with The Guardian newspaper. Her second collection Drives (Jonathan Cape) was published in 2008, in which year she won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a major Individual Artists Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Her third collection, Profit and Loss was Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2011, and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Leontia Flynn received the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy award for Irish poetry in 2013 and the AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund literary award in 2014. Her fourth collection The Radio was published in 2017, and was shorlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize and won the Irish Times poetry prize. She has also published a critical monograph on the poet Medbh McGuckian (2014), and a pamphlet of translations of the poet Catullus, Slim New Book (Lifeboat 2020). She was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022 and is a professor at Queen’s university.  Her fifth collection, Taking Liberties, was published with Cape in 2023.

Scott McKendry is from North Belfast. His poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. He’s the recipient of a Patrick Kavanagh Award. McKendry’s Curfuffle (Lifeboat) was Poetry Book Society Autumn Pamphlet Choice 2019. His collection, GUB (Corsair), will be out in 2024.

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), which won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her latest book, Useful Junk, was published by BOA Editions in 2022. Meitner’s poems have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Electric Literature, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The New Republic, Poetry, and elsewhere. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Loghaven Artist Residency, and T.S. Eliot House. She was also the 2015 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the MFA program in Creative Writing.