The Ireland Chair of Poetry is delighted to announce the winners of the 2024 Student Award. Now in its fifth year, the Student Award is an initiative encouraging the writing of poetry within the three universities that support the Trust.
The Trust has awarded the following students:
Kali Joy Cramer
Ruby Eastwood
Kate Morgan
Judy O’Kane
Babita Sharma
Alexis VanDusen
Commenting on the 2024 Student Award, the adjudication panel, comprised of two Trustees together with the current Ireland Chair of Poetry, Professor Paul Muldoon, had this to say:
“The tradition of the creative writing program has a long history in Ireland, dating back at least to the bardic schools. These flourished into the 1600s and allowed for the training of poets in formal verse. Though that training is less a feature of the modern creative writing program, our reimagined bardic schools serve an important role in the development of poetry north and south. The Ireland Professor of Poetry Trust is delighted to be able to honor some of the most talented of our poetry students and to encourage them in following their calling.”
Each student will be awarded a prize of €1,000. All prize winners have expressed their thanks to the Trust in their acceptance of the award.
Biographies:
Kali Joy Cramer (he/she) is from Chicago. He authored Sinister Chicago: Windy City Secrets, Urban Legends, and Sordid Characters. She is currently pursuing a love affair with the written word through an MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast.
Ruby Eastwood is a writer from Barcelona currently based in Dublin.
Kate Morgan is from Carlow. She is a Michael Longley Scholar pursuing the MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast.
Judy O’Kane’s work is published in The Irish Times, Manchester Review, The North, Southword, Archipelago, Landfall and 14 Magazine. Her pamphlet, ‘Olympia’ has recently been published by Clutag Press. She has just completed the MA in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre, QUB and holds a PhD in creative non-fiction from UEA. She has read at M.O.L.I., the Red Line Festival, the Irish Writers in London Summer School, the Irish Literary Society, and on RTE’s Poetry Programme. She has won the Charles Causley Poetry Prize, the National Memory Day Prize, the Irish Post Prize and the Listowel Writers’ Week Original Poem Prize.
Babita Sharma is a journalist, broadcaster, and poet based in Belfast. She is pursuing an MA in Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast, with an interest in second-generation migrant trauma and identity.
Alexis VanDusen grew up in Villa Hills, Kentucky. She is a current MA Creative Writing student at University College Dublin. Alexis is an aspiring poet and has earned a BA in Creative Writing from Western Kentucky University and a BA in English for Secondary Teachers.