HoCoPoLitSo’s guest for its 38th Annual Irish Evening is the award-winning poet Eamon Grennan. He will read from his work starting at 7:30 p.m., February 19, 2016, at the Smith Theatre in the Horowitz Center for Visual and Performing Arts on the campus of Howard Community College. Grennan’s reading will be followed by Narrowbacks Eileen Korn Estes, Jesse Winch, Terence Winch, Linda Hickman, and Brendan Mulvihill on fiddle in a concert of traditional Irish music, with stepdancers from the Culkin School and Irish coffee and beer for sale in the lobby.

Starting with Wildly for Days in 1983, Grennan’s work has earned him much praise from the literary collective, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins said of Grennan: “To read him is to be led on a walk through the natural world of clover and cricket and, most of all, light, and to face with an open heart the complexity of being human.”

Grennan has published more than twenty books of verse, along with translations and a collection of essays about modern Irish poetry; his latest is There Now (July 2015). His works have won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for Leopardi: Selected Poems (1997), the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for Still Life with Waterfall (2002), and Pushcart Prizes. His collection Out of Breath (2007) was nominated for the 2008 Poetry Now Award and he was a finalist for both the LA Times Book Prize for What Light There Is and Other Poems (1989) and So It Goes (1995) for the Paterson Poetry Prize.

Grennan follows other luminary Irish authors who have come to Howard County, including Frank McCourt, Eavan Boland, Hugo Hamilton, Paula Meehan, Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Colum McCann, and Emma Donoghue, to name a few.  For 38 years, HoCoPoLitSo’s Irish Evening has recognized and celebrated the enormous impact of Irish-born writers on the world of contemporary literature.

General admission tickets are $35 each; available on-line at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2465863 or by sending a check payable and self-addressed envelope mailed to HoCoPoLitSo, 10901 Little Patuxent Parkway, Horowitz Center 200, Columbia, MD 21044.