Vona Groarke (Ireland) read at the 2014 John Hewitt International Summer School, alongside Matt Bryden. As part of the Belfast International Arts Festival, Vona read at the 2017 John Hewitt Birthday Reading, with Sasha Dugdale and Stephen Sexton. Vona is reading online for the Gallery Goes event that is part of our 2020 Digital Festival of Literature and Ideas.

Vona is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and University College, Cork, and co-held the Heimbold Chair in Irish Studies at Villanova University (2005-2007). She was poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University and has published ten titles with Gallery Press: Shale (1994), Other People's Houses (1999), Flight (2002, shortlisted for the Forward Prize and winner of the Michael Hartnett Award), Juniper Street (2006), Spindrift (2009, a PBS Recommendation), X (2014, shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and a PBS Recommendation), Selected Poems (2016), and Double Negative (2019, shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award) and a book-length essay about art frames, Four Sides Full (2016).

In 2003, she edited a new edition of Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village and her version of the classic 18^th-century Irish poem, Lament for Art O'Leary was published in 2008. Vona has also served recently as Editor of Poetry Ireland Review (issues 113 through 120).