HoCoPoLitSo’s Annual Irish Evening features Irish writers and poets, Irish music, and Irish step-dancing. This program made its debut in 1979 and is chaired by HoCoPoLitSo’s Irish Evening Chair Catherine McLoughlin.

The following is a brief list of the many distinguished poets, novelists and memorists featured at Irish Evening: Frank McCourt, Seamus Heaney, Emma Donoghue, Pauala Meehan, Theo Dorgan, Colm Toibin, Column McCann, Claire Keegan, and Anne Enright.

Vona Groarke to read at HoCoPoLitSo’s 41st Irish Evening of Music and Poetry on February 8, 2019

HoCoPoLitSo’s guest for its annual Irish Evening on February 8, 2019, is the award-winning poet Vona Groarke, recipient of the 2017 Hennessy Hall of Fame Award for Lifetime Achievement. Groarke’s reading will be followed by a concert of Irish music and championship step dancing. During intermission, complimentary snacks and non-alcoholic beverages will be available. Irish coffee, specialty cocktails, and Guinness will be offered for sale beginning at 7 p.m. and during intermission. The program begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Smith Theatre of the Horowitz Center for Visual and Performing Arts on the campus of Howard Community College.

Vona Groarke’s most recent collection, Selected Poems, won the 2017 Pigott Prize for the best collection of poetry by an Irish poet. Noted as “brilliant and original” by the Irish Times, Groarke writes haunting and candidly sensual poems. At Irish Arts Center’s annual PoetryFest in New York, organizer and author Nick Laird extolled Groarke’s voice as “always modulated beautifully, assured and daring, often wry, (that) in the end keeps faith with the world.”

Groarke has published ten books, including a 2016 book-length personal essay, Four Sides Full and one translation, Lament of Art O’Leary (from an eighteenth-century Irish classic). A new collection of poems, Double Negative, is due in 2019. Her work has been recognized as one of Irish poetry’s “most consistently satisfying voices” (Agenda magazine) and “among the best Irish poets writing today” (Poetry Ireland Review). She has been the recipient of many prizes and grants, including the Brendan Behan Memorial Prize for her first collection, Shale (1994), the Michael Hartnett Award for Flight (2002), and is currently a Cullman Fellow at New York Public Library.

Performing traditional and original Irish music is the Hedge Band: Laura Byrne on flute, Billy McComiskey on the box accordion, Donna Long on piano and Jim Eagan on fiddle, accompanied by dancers Maureen Berry, founder and Director of the Teelin School of Irish Dance, and Saoirse DeBoy, the 2016 World Solo Championship winner (girls age 16-17).