Hold Open the Door: Commemorative Anthology from the Ireland Chair of Poetry

Hold Open the Door an anthology of original poems and critical essays by emerging Irish and Northern Irish poets created in response to the work of their mentors and major literary influences. The publication of this spirited anthology coincides with the commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Seamus Heaney winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, which served as the impetus to establish the Ireland Chair of Poetry, a three-year post jointly administered by Queen’s University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, and University College Dublin, as well as the Arts Councils of both Ireland and Northern Ireland. The authors and editors seek to honor the legacy and contributions of previous Chairs of Poetry and their peers, with the newly commissioned poems and critical reflections collected here sparking an intergenerational dialogue by bridging established names in Irish literature with a wealth of new and diverse voices emerging in the national scene. Featuring a new foreword from Frank Ormsby, the current Ireland Chair of Poetry, Hold Open the Door is a singular fusion of Irish literature’s past, present, and future, pointing the way forward for one of the Anglophone world’s most vibrant creative centers.

About the Author :
Micheal McCann is from Derry. His poems appear in fourteen poems, Poetry Ireland Review and The Manchester Review. His first pamphlet of poems - Safe Home - is published by Green Bottle Press, and he was a grateful recipient of an ACES award from the NI Arts Council in 2019. Summer Meline is a writer from Northern California and lives with her family. Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe is a poet, pacifist, and fabulist. She is the founder of the P[l]ay It Forward Fellowships, advisory board member of Ledbury Poetry Critics Ireland, and Next Generation Artist with the Arts Council of Ireland. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming with Faber & Faber in 2021. Marcella Prince grew up in Wisconsin. Her poems appear in literary magazines including The Tangerine, The Open Ear, and The Lonely Crowd. She is studying at Queen's University Belfast for a PhD with a focus on Midwestern-American poetry.

Review :
'Hold Open the Door is a varied and diverse selection of writing that reflects on the always revelatory, sometimes inexplicable nature of being mentored, and marks an important coordinate on the rich cloth-bound map of Irish poetry to come.' – Irish Times, Dec 2020