Gallery Goes . . . John Hewitt International Summer School presents Vona Groarke, Polina Cosgrave and Kelly Michels for a Poetry Reading during this year’s event organised by The John Hewitt Society.Vona Groarke has published fourteen books with The Gallery Press, most recently Infinity Pool (2025) and Woman of Winter (2023) with drawings by Isabel Nolan. Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara was published by New York University Press in 2022 and won the 2024 Michel Déon Prize. A member of Aosdána, she was a 2018-19 Fellow of the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library and is the current Writer in Residence at St John’s College, Cambridge. She was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She was recently selected as the incoming Ireland Professor of Poetry (2025-2028).
Polina Cosgrave was born in Volgograd in Russia and now lives in Dublin. She is a bilingual writer, performer and Arts Council award recipient. Her first collection, My Name Is, was published by Dedalus Press in 2020 and her second, Cargo (2024) by The Gallery Press. Her work is included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2022, has appeared in Russian journals and, here, in Banshee, Crannóg, The Irish Times, Southword and The Stinging Fly. Her film, Currency Exchange, was chosen for the Irish Poetry-Film screening at the 2023 Ó Bhéal Winter Warmer Festival.
Kelly Michels relocated to Ireland from the United States in 2019 and completed her PhD at UCD. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Tampa Review, Best New Poets and New Ohio Review. Her debut collection, American Anthem, was published by The Gallery Press in 2024 and was shortlisted for the Forward Arts Foundation Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection 2024. She has published two pamphlets, Mother and Child with Flowers (2012) and Disquiet (2015), and has received the Rachel Wetzsteon Poetry Prize from The 92nd Street Y, the Spoon River Poetry Review Editor’s Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She lives in Dublin.
