Official Website of Eamonn Wall

JUST PUBLISHED...

Navigating back and forth between cities and rural spaces, America and Ireland, the ancient and modern, the classroom and home, Eamonn Wall’s new collection presents a many-sided exploration of a fine and fractured world. A centerpiece of Sailing Lake Mareotis is “Actaeon’s Return,” a reworking of Ovid set in a nightmarish Ireland of the future. In a gathering of lyrics, sequences, satires, and flash-fictions, Eamonn Wall explores intricate ways in which contemporary attitudes and practices honour and defile what has been inherited from the past.

Praise for A Tour of Your Country:

Eamonn Wall has become one of the most prominent and exciting contemporary voices of the Irish-American experience. He has an intimate understanding of what it means to be neither here nor there, and his words pull us toward new places. A Tour of Your Country reminds us that we are all linked to foggy roads elsewhere, and it celebrates displacement with the exuberant joy of a homecoming. An Sionnach

A hugely impressive collection. RTE Guide

Wall’s unique achievement is to understand that landscape is culture. The book’s final poem, “Leaving Boise”, though ostensibly describing a road-trip away from the city, stitches personal experience into the wider history of Irish emigration. Not only the US but Ireland is full of wonders and pleasures for this generous writer. The Irish Times

Eamonn Wall is the author of six collections of poetry: A Tour of Your Country (2008), Refuge at De Soto Bend (2004), The Crosses (2000), Iron Mountain Road (1997), and Dyckman-200th Street (1994), all published by Salmon Publishing in Ireland.

Individual poems have been published in The Shop, Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, West47, TriQuarterly, Crab Orchard Review, South Dakota Review, River Styx, The Recorder, New Hibernia Review, Eire-Ireland, Nebraska Review, and other journals.

Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions was published by University of Notre Dame Press in 2011.

“Bringing an ecocritical approach to seven contemporary authors whose work is inspired by the West of Ireland, Wall breaks new ground in transatlantic studies by drawing parallels between representations of that region and the American West” (Isle).

“Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions, Wall has distilled the earlier experience of geographical binarism into an illuminating critical approach. His new book examines contemporary Irish writing on the West of Ireland through the wide-angle lens of cultural, critical, and literary writing on the American West. Though his focus remains on the Irish writers, apt evocations of American parallels enrich the texture of his analysis” (Andrew Auge, New Hibernia Review).

“Wall’s meticulous and timely scholarship, which incorporates recent texts such as Christine Cusick’s Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts, ensures the book’s status within the field of ecocriticism” (Donna Potts, Irish Literary Supplement).

From the Sin-e Café to the Black Hills, a collection of essays, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2000 and awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize by the American Conference for Irish Studies for excellence in scholarship.

Essays, articles, and reviews of Irish, Irish American, and American writers have appeared in New Hibernia Review, Irish Literary Supplement, The Irish Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, South Carolina Review, An Sionnach, and other journals.

A longtime member of the American Conference for Irish Studies, Eamonn Wall served as president of the organization from 2005-2007.

A native of Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, Ireland, Eamonn Wall has lived in the US since 1982. He was educated at University College, Dublin; the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; and the City University of New York-Graduate Center, where he received his Ph.D. in English.

Eamonn Wall lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and is Smurfit-Stone Professor of Irish Studies and Professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He teaches courses in Irish and Irish-American Literature and Creative Writing, directs the UM-St. Louis Irish Summer School in Galway, and serves as co-coordinator of the Irish Studies Program.