Poetry Readings & Lectures Sponsored by the Marie Frazee-Baldassarre Professorship

Leontia Flynn, born in County Down, Northern Ireland, will read from her most recent volume of poetry, The Radio, which won the Irish Times Poetry Now Prize and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.  Her earlier volumes have won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish poetry, and many other honors.  She lives in Belfast and teaches creative writing at Queen’s University Belfast.

Natalie Diaz may be the only poet who was a professional basketball player before winning a MacArthur prize in 2018. An enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community, she is Mojave and teaches in the Creative Writing MFA program at Arizona State University. Diaz will be reading from her book When My Brother Was an Aztec.

Geraldine Higgins, a native of Ballymena, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland, and a professor in the English Department at  Emory University, will speak on “Exhibiting Seamus Heaney.”  Professor Higgins curated the Seamus Heaney exhibition now on display in Dublin and is the author of many books on Irish writing.

Roy Foster, acclaimed Irish historian, biographer of Yeats, and recently retired Carroll Professor of Irish History at Hertford College, Oxford, will speak on “Yeats and the Place of Writing in Modern Ireland.”