Join host, novelist Belinda McKeon, and poets Rafael Mendes and Susan Connolly for this two-hander poetry reading and In Conversation on the dominant themes in their work exploring the sacred and ordinary; of place, home, identity, staying and leaving.
Time: 1pm -2pm
Date: Sat Sept 6
Venue: Old Methodist Church,
St Laurence St.
Drogheda
Free event. Booking required.
Belinda McKeon is a novelist. Her first novel, Solace (Picador, 2011) won the Faber Prize and was named Irish Book of the Year. She is also the author of Tender (2015) and the editor of the collection A Kind of Compass. She curated Poetry Now, Ireland’s largest festival, for five years, and was the co-founder of the Irish Arts Center PoetryFest in New York. She now directs the MA in Creative Writing at Maynooth University and lives in Co. Louth
Rafael Mendes is a Brazilian-Irish migrant whose work has recently appeared or is upcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Wasafari, and gorse.
He was part of Poetry Ireland Introductions 2023, and his pamphlet, The Migrant Dictionary (Howl New Irish Writing, 2025), was a co-winner of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Pamphlet Series 2025.
Susan Connolly was born and lives in Drogheda, Co. Louth. She has published three full- length collections of poetry: For the Stranger (Dedalus Press, 1993), Forest Music (Shearsman Books, 2009) and Bridge of the Ford (Shearsman Books, 2016).
Her poems are included in The Field Day Anthology: vol IV, Voices and Poetry of Ireland and Windharp:Poems of Ireland since 1916.
In 2024 she was awarded an Agility Award from the ArtsCouncil of Ireland to make POEM, a handwritten concrete poem over three metres long. This is a collaboration with Drogheda based artist John Moloney.