Peter Fallon, poet and publisher, is the John J. Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies for the 2012-2013 academic year. Fallon lives in Loughcrew, County Meath, Ireland. He is an Honors Graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. The Center for Irish Programs and the John J. Burns Library are pleased to announce that on Tuesday, November 13, 2012 at 4:00 p.m. in the Burns Library’s Thompson Room, Fallon will give a reading entitled “A Poetry Reading by Peter Fallon: Selected and New Poems.” In a complementary offering, the Burns Library is exhibiting several Gallery Press titles in the Fine Print Room. This event is free and open to the public. If you would like to attend, please RSVP to Joan Reilly at 617-552-6396 or joan.reilly@bc.edu.
At the age of eighteen, Fallon founded The Gallery Press, which has published more than four hundred books of poems and plays by Ireland’s preeminent writers. Included in this distinguished group are Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, John Banville, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Michael Hartnett. This semester, Fallon is teaching a graduate seminar at the Burns Library entitled “Heaney & Friel: Writing Ireland, Writing the World.” During the Spring Semester, Fallon will teach an undergraduate writing workshop on poetry in the Burns Library.
Fallon has given more than 200 poetry readings at universities and colleges in the United States, and has read in a dozen countries in Europe as well as in Canada and Japan. He has had readings at conferences and festivals such as the inaugural International Writers’ Conference, Ottawa, the first Dublin Writers’ Festival, the Beall Poetry Festival in Waco, Texas, the Aldeburgh Festival in England and the 2011 Kenyon Review Literary Festival in Ohio. In addition to readings, Fallon has conducted workshops at The Irish Writers’ Centre, Cúirt, The International Writers’ Festival, Galway, and at the Yeats International Summer School.
Fallon’s collections of poems include The Speaking Stones (1978), Winter Work (1983), The News and Weather (1987) and Eye to Eye (1992). A volume of his selected poems, News of the World, was published in the United States by Wake Forest University Press in 1993. An expanded edition, News of the World: Selected and New Poems, was published by Gallery Press in 1998, and was included among the Irish Times’ “Books of the Year.” His poems have been translated into French, German, Irish and Japanese, and volumes of Selected Poems have been published in Romanian and Hungarian. In addition, Fallon has also co-edited the best-selling anthology The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry with poet Derek Mahon. Fallon also contributed to The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: 550 A.D. to the Present.
In 1993, Fallon received the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the Irish American Cultural Institute. In 2009 he received an Alumni Award from Trinity College, Dublin, where he was subsequently appointed Adjunct Professor in the School of English. His academic posts include Writer Fellow and Visiting Writer at Trinity College Dublin, Poet in Residence at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and the inaugural Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University, which also conferred on him an Honorary Doctorate. Fallon is a member of Aosdána, the association which elects and “honors artists who have made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland.”
Join us for Peter Fallon’s reading on November 13th at 4 p.m. in the Thompson Room (RSVP to Joan Reilly, 617-552-6936 or joan.reilly@bc.edu). If you cannot attend this event then please visit the Burns Library another time to enjoy the display of Gallery Press books in the Fine Print Room.
- Kathleen Williams, Irish Studies Librarian
John J. Burns Library Blog 
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