11 – Jess Mc Kinney

Welcome to Day 11 of our West Cork Literary Festival Advent Calendar. Our author today is Jess Mc Kinney.

Jess Mc Kinney is a poet from Inishowen, Donegal. In 2020 she completed her MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, where she was awarded the Irish Chair of Poetry Student Award. In 2021 she was awarded a place on the Dedalus Press Mentorship Programme, along with the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Summer School. Her poetry has appeared in The Moth, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, SAND Journal, Channel Magazine, Abridged, The Poetry Jukebox and the New Island anthology The New Frontier: Writing from the Irish Border. Her debut pamphlet ‘Weeding’ was published with Hazel Press in September 2021, and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award.

Jess is reading an extract from Weeding which was published by Hazel Press in September 2021. Today’s video unlocked on 11th December 2021 and may be viewed below. Closed caption subtitles are available and may be turned on or off. Click on “youtube” or “full screen” icon in the video to watch it in full screen or visit youtube here.

About our WCLF Literary Advent Calendar

2021 was another wonderful year for Irish writing and so many incredible books by Irish authors and authors living in Ireland were released this year. Even though festivals returned in-person and online not every author had the opportunity to launch their books with a public celebration or to engage with audiences in the “usual” way. We’re delighted to bring you a small selection of these authors and we’ve invited twenty-four writers to submit a short video reading from their new books. Our selection is an attempt to show the wide range of Irish writing and in particular to focus on writers whose books we feel deserve more attention and those who were not previously featured in WCLF 2021 events. We hope that you will enjoy the chance to hear these writers reading their own work and to discover some new books for your reading piles.