Susan Connolly will read from her new poetry collection midwinter for the Belfast launch, taking place in the Ulster University Art Gallery.

Brugh, Brú, Bro, Broe, Brow, Sí an Bhrú, Brú na Bóinne, Newgrange; Cnogba, Cnoc Búa, Chnó-guba, Knowth; the Boyne Cable Bridge, the Mary McAleese Bridge, the M1 Bridge. Different names for the same place, different meanings for the same sound. In midwinter Susan Connolly explores her home landscape in visual poetry using the typewriter, a letter stamp set and handwriting as a means of expression. Her collection includes 'The Orchard Keeper', her lyric sequence about the Co. Meath war-poet Francis Ledwidge.

Susan Connolly was born in Drogheda, Co. Louth where she still lives. 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). She was awarded the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry in 2001. In the same year she received a Publications Grant from the Heritage Council of Ireland for A Salmon in the Pool, a literary and place-names map of the river Boyne from source to sea.

This publication is supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and the Shared Island Civic Society Fund, managed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Government of Ireland.

The Limits of Nostalgia with poet Máighréad Medbh and academic Dr. Margaret Buckley where they delve into the past with a mix of poetry, history and local stories. Venue: Desmond Complex.

Damer House Gallery celebrates Culture Night 2026 in the Black Mills Roscrea, with artist Bernie Masterson and poet Máighréad Medbh

Join artist Bernie Masterson and performance poet Máighréad Medbh for an evening of lively exchange and creative insight. Through presentations of their work, they will discuss the ideas, processes, and experiences that drive their practices, offering a chance to hear directly from two distinctive voices in contemporary art and performance. This conversation invites audiences into the heart of their practice— the questions they pursue, the forms they shape, and the perspectives that inform their work — creating a space for reflection, curiosity, and connection.

Belfast Book Festival Poet in Residence Susanna Galbraith Presents

A reading & conversation with Shannon Kuta Kelly & Matthew Rice

Date: Thursday 11 June 2026

Time: 16.30 - 17.30

Venue: The Crescent

Price: Pay What You Decide - Recommended Price £12.50

In this salon-style event, Poet-in-Residence Susanna Galbraith will be joined by Belfast-based poets Shannon Kuta Kelly and Matthew Rice. The session will include readings and conversations around the making and editing of their recent collections, slight forms, cumulative meaning, and where poetry’s attention meets environment, narrative and transformation. 

The Tree Is Missing (Faber, 2026) by Shannon Kuta Kelly explores ‘the poetics of the border’, identity and storytelling with a ‘restless immediacy’. 

plastic (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025) by Matthew Rice is a book-length poem in time-stamped parts ‘exploring the life of the night-shift industrial worker turned poet’. 

morsels (Macha Press, 2025) by Susanna Galbraith ‘explores the ways language and its absences shape our relationships with one another and our environments’.

Meet the poets

Susanna Galbraith is from Belfast. She won the Red Line Book Festival Poetry Competition 2021, was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions 2023 and New Voices: North 2025, and is Belfast Book Festival Poet in Residence 2026. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Propel and others, and her essays in Source Photographic Review, HU and Stories of TULCA. Her first book morsels was published by Macha Press in 2025.

Shannon Kuta Kelly is the author of The Tree is Missing (Faber, 2026). She holds a PhD from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University Belfast, where she served as Ciaran Carson Fellow. She is a founder and editor at Macha Press. The US edition of her book is forthcoming publication with McSweeney's in 2027.

Matthew Rice was born in Belfast. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer (2021), published by Summer Palace Press, was an Arts Council of Northern Ireland top ten books of the year pick. He holds an MA and a PhD from Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow for 2026 at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. His new book is plastic (2026), published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK/EU) and Soft Skull Press (US). plastic was included on the American Booksellers Association Indie Next List for January of this year, selected by independent booksellers across North America.

Poetry’s Environments Conference Programme

13:45 - 15:00, Thursday, 11 June Cloth Hall Court

Marks & Materials 2

Máighréad Medbh, Vertigo of the Source: Wind Farm on a Waste Ridge

Lisa Kelly, Scavenger of Signs: A Poetry Performance Exploring How British Sign Language (BSL) as a Visual and Embodied Language Enhances Communication with the Environment
JR Carpenter, p a u s e. : a lecture performance on durational writing as land acknowledgement
Lydia Kennaway, The Marker Committee: Expanding the Poetic Page

Cotton Room

For more information: https://conferences.leeds.ac.uk/poetryenvironment/programme/

In conversation with poet Natasha Cuddington, Ruth Carr discusses her new poetry collection, Catching the Missing Beat, and reflects on her journey as a writer, editor and tutor. 

Known for her support of women writers, Ruth is the co-founder of independent poetry publisher Macha Press and the editor of The Female Line: An Anthology of Northern Irish Women. 

Ruth’s new collection considers how the past can be accommodated within the present, reflecting on personal experience, overlooked lives, war, global warming and nature.

Meet the poets

In her fourth collection Ruth Carr invites the reader to reflect on the past, the present and the future. Values are weighed up through personal recollection, observations of nature, animals, the weather, current issues and reflections on some quite remarkable lives. What emerges is an attempt to find, against the backdrop of global warming and warmongering, ‘a kind of synthesis / where whole and broken heart / are intimate.’ Her work has been widely anthologized, has appeared on billboards, been put to music by the Ulster Orchestra, and she has read in venues ranging from Kilcar to Moscow.

Natasha Cuddington is a poet and critic. Her translations, essays and reviews have appeared variously. An assistant editor at Cyphers, she co-curated Of Mouth and was a Belfast Book Festival Associate in 2022 and 2023. She leads workshops at The Crescent Arts Centre, Open Arts and collaborates with disability arts charities. With Ruth Carr, she co-edited Ann Zell’s posthumous Donegal is a red door and Her Other Language: Northern Irish Women Writers Address Domestic Violence and Abuse. Her debut Each of us (our chronic alphabets) was published in 2018.

Date: Saturday 06 June 2026

Time: 15.00 - 16.30

Venue: The Crescent

Price: Pay What You Decide - Recommended Price £12.50

Aggregate Inventions

A multi-media Poetry Performance by Christodoulos Makris and Máighréad Medbh.

Máighréad Medbh will perform ‘Faces for Kate’, a conceptual piece from her most recent book, Dwelling. Dwelling is a transhistorical, multi-genre exploration pivoted on a 1913 photograph of the poet’s great-grandmother. ‘Faces for Kate’ engages with various historical events and images, and ironizes AI technology.

‘The Ugly Truth’, by Christodoulos Makris, is one of four long poems constituting a new book-length work with title nobody is going to be unique: an intuition-led, hybrid-form engagement with the impact of the accelerated use of machine intelligence on human creativity, endeavour, identity, and – particularly in ‘The Ugly Truth’ – corporeality (war, sex, climate etc).

Bios:

Christodoulos Makris has published five books of poetry, as well as several limited-edition pamphlets, artists’ books, digital projects, audiovisual works and other poetry objects. Recent awards include a Curatorial Commission from Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), Dublin, and an Artist Residency at Irish Arts Center, New York. He is the poetry editor at gorse.

Máighréad Medbh is a poet, essayist, and performer, interested in historical and conceptual explorations. She has published ten books, including a poetic narrative of the Irish Famine and an ecological allegory, Parvit of Agelast, shortlisted for the 2017 Pigott Prize. She has collaborated on award-winning art films, written for radio, and has three online novels.

Event details:

Thursday, 28th May 6:00 pm

Glass Box Gallery

Belfast School of Art

25-51 York St,
Belfast BT15 1ED

Macha Press is supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, and the Shared Island Civic Society Fund, managed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Government of Ireland.

Dwelling by Máighréad Medbh

Book a ticket here via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/macha-press-dublin-launch-dwelling-maighread-medbh-tickets-1986986513149?aff=ebdsoporgprofile

DWELLING, Máighréad Medbh’s tenth book, is a work of excavation: lyrical, archival, and embodied. A transhistorical exploration that is formally hybrid, it deftly interweaves many forms of poetry and prose. Join Macha Press to celebrate the publication of DWELLING, with a reading by the poet and a physical improvisation performance by movement artists Anatolii Liaskolo and Joan Somers Donnelly.

This event is presented in association with Poetry Ireland and is supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Máighréad Medbh and Simon Maddrell

7.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

For more information: https://www.corkpoetryfest.net/friday.html

Máighréad Medbh is a poet and prose writer with nine published books. Most of her poetry books are long-form sequences or narratives, and her ecological verse novel, Parvit of Agelast (Arlen House), was shortlisted for the 2017 Pigott Prize. After her first book from Blackstaff Press in 1990, she earned a reputation for dramatic presentation, performing widely in Ireland and abroad. She has written for radio, collaborated on award-winning art films, and has three novels online. In 2025 she was awarded the Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill Poetry Exchange, during which she completed her new work Dwelling, a transhistorical exploration of identity, change and displacement, conflating poetry and essay.

Dwelling is a work of excavation: lyrical, archival, and embodied. The reader is drawn into the sense that the past, from ancient myths to emigration stories, is not just subject matter but a living archive that demands an equally compelling, emotionally resonant and formally inventive poetry. A work of breath and vertigo.

Dwelling by Máighréad Medbh

Book a ticket here via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/macha-press-belfast-launch-dwelling-maighread-medbh-tickets-1986988316543?aff=ebdsoporgprofile

Dwelling is a work of excavation: lyrical, archival, and embodied. At its centre is the poet’s great grandmother, likely the subject of eviction during the clearances after the Irish Famine: a figure both spectral and grounding. From her displacement unfolds a meditation on ownership and loss, land and energy, and how memory itself is harvested and converted into power.

This hybrid text moves between poem, essay, and fieldwork, where turbines rise like white demigods over ancestral patches of ground, and wind is an agent of both inheritance and erasure. Through acts of walking, reading, and reimagining, the poet explores how stories and the human trace are preserved — and who preserves them — in a landscape forever rewritten by industry, weather, and the vagaries of history. The reader is drawn into the sense that the past, from ancient myths to emigration stories, is not just subject matter but a living archive that demands an equally compelling, emotionally resonant and formally inventive poetry.

A work of breath and vertigo, Dwelling asks: what does it mean to belong to land that no longer remembers you — or that you no longer recognize?  

Macha Press is supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, and the Shared Island Civic Society Fund, managed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Government of Ireland.

New Work from Lapwing, Macha & Revival Press

New Work from Lapwing, Macha & Revival Press.

With Patrick Dillon, Susanna Galbraith & Margaret O’Driscoll.

Featuring : Patrick Dillon, Susanna Galbraith, Margaret O’Driscoll

Venue : Stables

Time : 11:30

Ticket Price : €8.00

More information: https://strokestownpoetryfest.ie/events/new-work-from-lapwing-macha-revival-press/

Tickets: https://strokestownpoetryfest.ie/all-tickets/new-work-from-lapwing-macha-revival/

The Cúirt Poetry Sessions, in association with Poetry Ireland/Éigse Éireann

Friday, 24 April 2026, 6:00pm

CHARLIE BYRNE’S BOOKSHOP / FREE

Susanna Galbraith’s Morsels, published by Macha Press in 2025, has a voice as fresh and daring as it is assured and elegant, experimenting with erasure, structuralism, and folk tales.

Nithy Kasa’s How to Make Love to a Colonised Body, published by Doire Press in 2026, addresses our relationships, both personal and political, playing with language and testing the Irish lyric.

Join poet Susanna Galbraith and poet and artist Sophie Herxheimer for readings, intermedia matter and discussion on the relationship between poetry and mythology, and also poetry and art. This interdisciplinary salon will highlight the collaborative design and publishing ethos of Macha Press.

Saturday, April 11, 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

The Feminist Library,

Sojourner Truth Community Centre,

161 Sumner Rd, Peckham, London

SE15 6JL

Free event, all very welcome.

Bookings via The Feminist Library’s Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/paper-cuts-and-poetry-tickets-1984782844918?aff=oddtdtcreator

More information here: https://feministlibrary.co.uk/2026/03/11/paper-cuts-and-poetry-discussion-with-readings-by-susanna-galbraith-sophie-herxheimer/

Contemporary Cultures of Writing (CCW) research cluster introduces: Social Engagement & Ecological Concerns in Contemporary Irish Poetry, a discussion with readings by Susanna Galbraith & Sam Furlong.

Tuesday, March 5, 3:30pm - 5:00pm. Thomas Reynolds Room, The Open University Belfast, 110 Victoria Street, Belfast, BT1 3GN.

Two poets will discuss social engagement and ecological concerns in their debut collections with two editors from Macha Press. With readings from their recent titles, Crowd Work by Sam Furlong and morsels by Susanna Galbraith. Macha Press editors will also outline the Macha Press call for submissions.

Free event, all very welcome. Bookings via Eventbrite or by email at: Creative-Writing-Interventions@open.ac.uk

Wind down on a Sunday night with some music and poetry in Seatons of Sailortown!

Macha Press Poets

Susanna Galbraith is a poet from Belfast. She has a particular interest in areas where literature and visual art overlap and interact. She is an editor of Abridged magazine. Her poems and essays have been published widely, and she has received several Arts Council of Northern Ireland awards. Her debut collection, Morsels, was launched in 2025. 

Máighréad Medbh is a poet with nine published books and a reputation for compelling performance. Since her debut with Blackstaff Press in 1990, she has performed widely in Ireland, Europe, the UK and US.  She works mostly in long-form sequences  and her ecological verse novel, Parvit of Agelast was shortlisted for the 2017 Pigott Prize.

Macha Press is an all-island poetry publisher founded in 2024. We are a not-for profit collective, and all income generated by sales and fees to editors goes back into the press. We publish two books per year, one by an emerging poet and one by an established poet. The twin aims of Macha Press are to publish poetry by marginalised voices, including work that is innovative, hybrid and intercultural, and to promote the visibility and dissemination of underrepresented poetries to a wider audience. 

Bossa Nova Blue
Meabh Cormacain and Paul Webster reinterpret the songs of Tom Jobim, Vinicius de Moraes and Joao Gilberto. They play traditional Brazilian melodies and familiar songs with a bossa twist across voice, violin and guitar bringing a passion and authenticity rarely found outside of Brazil. Bossa Nova is the melancholy samba jazz of 1950s and 60s Rio de Janeiro. The sea, sun, sand and exquisite longing for love were captured by poets and musicians who made their home in the beaches and mountains of the ‘cidade maravilhosa’.

Macha Press was founded in 2024 by seven poets, each with manifold areas of practice. Macha publishes poetry that is experimental, formally hybrid and/or interdisciplinary. Join editors Natasha Cuddington and Kathleen McCracken alongside poets Eilish Martin and Susanna Galbraith. They will discuss poetry and process— from the poets’ initial drafts, to the in-depth, collaborative editing work undertaken by the Macha team and finally, to publication. Martin and Galbraith will read a select number of poems as part of this unique conversation. Join Macha Press and celebrate their dynamic poets and publications!

morsels has been generously supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Additional funding has been provided by Belfast City Council.

catflap #5 LAUNCH

The hottest publication in queer lit is back, as we launch the fifth edition of catflap, Outburst’s annual journal of smart queer writing with a disco heart!

Distributed globally and featuring local and international writers and artists, issue #5 of catflap is bursting with fresh conversations, poetry, and essays exploring the currents of queer ruminations, edited by author So Mayer and beautifully coalesced with design by Other Office.

To celebrate the launch, we’ll be taking over the Black Box for a vivid evening of poetry, readings, and special performances from catflap contributors and invited guests, including Cat Brogan (NI),
Dayna Ash (Lebanon), Sam Furlong (ROI), Leandro Reyes (Phillipines) and a very special words and music performance from poet CAConrad (USA) with banjo player Jacken Elswyth.

catflap will be available to purchase on the night, throughout the festival, and beyond.

Event supported by the British Council

WHEN: Saturday 15 November WHERE: The Black Box
TIME: 20:30 (doors 20:00) TICKETS: £16 with copy of catflap, £10 without / £5 DURATION: 90 mins AGE GUIDANCE: 18+

Writing the Body

Gustav Parker Hibbett, Sam Furlong and Sophie White in conversation with Molly Twomey

In Partnership with Irish Writers Centre

Joining our panel are poet and essayist Gustav Parker Hibbett whose debut collection High Jump as Icarus Storywon the 2025 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, Sam Furlong whose just-published debut book isCrowd Work, and podcaster and columnist Sophie White, whose 8 books include The Snag List, Where I End and most recently, Such a Good Couple. They will chat to Molly Twomey, author of the poetry collections, Raised Among Vultures and Chic to be Sad, about the body and how it filters through their words, from how it can break to all it can bear.

Susanna Galbraith’s debut collection, morsels (Macha Press) is a formally ambitious multi-sequence debut collection. The title series ‘morsels’ explores the ways language and its absences shape our relationships with one another, with natural environments, and with human and animal bodies. Across three interconnected sequences, Galbraith makes sensitive yet tough-minded forays into unstable, ever-evolving territories: love, death and memory, loss and anxiety, isolation and transformation, and the craft of poetry making. Join us to launch this unique collection.

Susanna Galbraith is from Belfast. Her poems have been published in New England Review, Poetry Ireland Introductions, Propel, Poetry Wales, Berlin Lit, Banshee, Channel Magazine, Cyphers, Tour de Moon, The Tangerine, and Arlen House anthologies. Her essays have appeared in Source Photographic Review, the HU and Stories of TULCA. She was selected for Irish Writers Centre New Voices: North
2025, Seamus Heaney Summer School 2024, Poetry Ireland Introductions 2023 and Stinging Fly Summer School 2021. She was awarded first place in the Red Line Book Festival Poetry Competition 2021 and has been the recipient of several Arts Council of Northern Ireland Support for Individual Artists Programme awards. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of York and a BA in English from Trinity College Dublin where she was an editor of Icarus Magazine. She is currently the project editor of Abridged, a researcher at Source Photographic Review and associate artist at Kids Own Publishing Partnership.

This book has been generously supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Additional funding has been provided by Belfast City Council.

The Belfast launch of Susanna Galbraith’s debut poetry collection, morsels.

This book has been generously supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Additional funding has been provided by Belfast City Council.

Susanna Galbraith with Macha Press Editors Natasha Cuddington and Milena Williamson. This free event will feature the poetry of Belfast poet Susanna Galbraith, along with discussion and intermedia matter documenting Macha Press’s uniquely co-active design approach.

This event is being presented in association with the Seamus Heaney Centre at QUeen’s University Belfast and Belfast City Council.

To mark the birth of celebrated Belfast poet John Hewitt, The John Hewitt Society presents an evening of poetry in the bar that carries his name. Featuring acclaimed poet, translator, and visual artist Eilish Martin, alongside Geoffrey Dearmer Prize winner Dean Browne, the event brings together two distinct yet resonant voices in contemporary Irish poetry. Martin’s lyrical sharpness meets Browne’s wit and clarity in a reading that honours Hewitt’s legacy while looking forward. Presented in association with Poetry Ireland.