Interview
“I came to nursing late and with almost no warning”: An Interview with Sara Berkeley
Sara Berkeley’s newest collection, Some of the Things I’ve Seen, is available this month from Wake Forest University Press. Originally published as The Last Cold Day in Ireland by The Gallery Press, this book chronicles Berkeley’s move across the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as her work as a hospice nurse, a career she…
Continue ReadingJohn McAuliffe in Conversation with Conor O’Callaghan
In honor of John McAuliffe’s Selected Poems, we’re revisiting his 2013 interview with Conor O’Callaghan in The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry III. In the interview, John McAuliffe discusses writing some of his earliest poems, relocating with his family to Manchester, what it means to write an “Irish poem,” and his relationship to American…
Continue ReadingFrom “The Butterfly Notebook” to The Magpie and the Child: An Interview with Catriona Clutterbuck
Catriona Clutterbuck’s debut collection, The Magpie and the Child, is out this month, and the book was a long time in the making. Bernard O’Donoghue, fellow Irish poet and academic, interviewed Clutterbuck about moving forward through the act of making poems, the two-way traffic of absence and presence, and the process of transforming manuscript to book…
Continue ReadingFrank Sewell on Editing and Translating Máirtín Ó Direáin: An Interview
This month, Máirtín Ó Direáin’s Selected Poems/Rogha Dánta was released in the US, the first time his work has been published outside of Ireland. We wanted to know more about Ó Direáin’s place in Irish-language poetry, as well as editor Frank Sewell’s process in selecting and translating these poems. Brian Ó Conchubhair, Associate Professor of Irish Language and Literature at the University of Notre Dame, led a fascinating conversation with Sewell, the transcription of which we’ve included here.
Continue Reading“A Deep Ocean One Can Plunge Into”: An Interview with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s newest book The Mother House was published in the US this April, and it has been gaining praise across the board, including being chosen for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Despite finishing out the semester at home, WFU Press intern Emelyn Hatch conducted an interview with the poet via email to dig deeper into this shining collection.
Continue ReadingThe Poet and “Protection of Innocence”: An Interview with Harry Clifton
To celebrate the release of Herod’s Dispensations, WFU Press interviewed poet Harry Clifton about the creation of his newest collection. Herod’s Dispensations unites a variety of themes and places, with Clifton drawing inspiration from experiences both in Ireland and China. Here, he discusses the evolution of the collection from its original focus on “art, children and death,” and touches on the elements that bring these poems together.
Continue Reading“Looser, Freer, and a Bit Wilder”: An Interview with Conor O’Callaghan
Conor O’Callaghan’s newest book of poetry Live Streaming has just been published in North America, and for months we’ve been anxiously awaiting this exciting release. O’Callaghan has been busy giving readings for the book, most recently here in the US, where he went coast to coast visiting five states in five days before returning home to England. WFU Press intern Maddie Baxter caught him via Skype at the tail-end of this trip to ask him a few questions about the book, his process, and the personal nature of this extraordinary new collection.
Continue ReadingRadio Signals: An interview with Leontia Flynn
Leontia Flynn’s The Radio is out this month, so WFU Press interns gathered to ask the poet more about her newest collection. Written in three sections, The Radio explores the boundaries of home and family life from Flynn’s experience caring for her infant child, to coping with her father’s death, to remembering the influence of…
Continue Reading“What Voice? Whose Voice?” An Interview with David Wheatley on The President of Planet Earth
The President of Planet Earth is Wheatley’s fifth collection, and his talent for a wide range of poetic styles and voices is on full display. Here we have prose poems, concrete poems, sestinas and sonnets, alongside more experimental forms. Wheatley draws inspiration from Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, Samuel Beckett, and Ian Hamilton Finlay, among others. The result is a fascinating and subversively comedic trek across land and time. In this interview, Wheatley tells us more about his daring new collection and the voices therein.
Continue ReadingAn Interview with Frank Ormsby on THE DARKNESS OF SNOW
WFU Press interns gathered to ask the poet Frank Ormsby more about his collection, The Darkness of Snow. Written in five parts, the poems explore vast territory from Ormsby’s childhood in Fermanagh, to life with Parkinson’s, to the difficulty of bearing witness in the face of atrocity. Here, the poet discusses poetic friendships, recurring themes in his poetry, and the anti-muse.
Continue ReadingAn interview with Harry Clifton: Returning to Portobello “was like rebuilding an identity from the ground up”
Harry Clifton has lived in places throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia, but his newest volume, Portobello Sonnets, focuses back on the district in Dublin where he currently lives, having returned after sixteen years in continental Europe. In this interview, he talks about how his work has evolved over time and place, and what ultimately brought him home. WFU Press:…
Continue Reading“The Importance of Breathing”: An Interview with Conor O’Callaghan
Nicole Fitzpatrick conducted this interview with Conor O’Callaghan in January 2014. Fitzpatrick is an M.A. English candidate at Wake Forest University and works as an intern at Wake Forest University Press. O’Callaghan lived in Winston-Salem, North Carolina from 2005-2007 during which time he taught at Wake Forest University. Much of The Sun King connects to…
Continue ReadingDream Language
” …you swim from core state to fugue state in undirected milky water to a black-filled circle, which is your fully fledged city dwindled into a village” — from “Broken Pot Used as Writing Material” Here at WFU Press we’re busy with the final…
Continue ReadingMusic as Muse: The Importance of Jazz for Michael Longley
In an interview with Culture Northern Ireland, our poet Michael Longley stated that his favorite types of music were “Boogie-woogie and Bach.” Longley claims that he has been guided by the musical muse since he first began writing in his teenage years. According to an article Longley wrote for The Guardian in 2011, the muse has…
Continue ReadingInterview with an Intern!
This past semester, our new intern Kelly Neubeiser had the opportunity to intern with Simon & Schuster in London. Today, Kelly sat down with us to discuss some of her experiences at S&S, and we realized that while these two publishers could not be any more dissimilar, there are some elements that this publishing powerhouse…
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