Love Poetry Today: Bebe Ashley, Leeanne Quinn & Stephen Sexton

Come along for a conversation on the ever-present and ever-changing nature of love poetry, with Leeanne Quinn, author of two collections of poems with Dedalus Press and the co-editor of Romance Options: Love Poems for Today (Dedalus), Stephen Sexton, author of two poetry collections, including the Forward Prize winning If All the World and Love Were Young, and Bebe Ashley, a poet, translator and sign-language poet innovator, and most recently the author of Gold Light Shining (Banshee).

In a world that is constantly changing, economies and environments failing, love poems still persist. Please join us for a wide-ranging conversation that will ask why do we feel compelled to write and read them, and how love poetry might be transforming to face our current age.

Bebe Ashley lives in Belfast. Her work is most recently published in bath magg, Poetry Ireland Review, and Modern Poetry in Translation. Her debut collection Gold Light Shining was published by Banshee Press. In 2021, Bebe was longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment and awarded a Chair of Ireland Poetry Trust Award. Most recently, Bebe was selected as one of nine artists to receive a Digital Evolution Award in support of a project Confetti that explores poetic potential of Braille and 3D printing. For more information about Bebe and her work visit; bebe-ashley.com

Leeanne Quinn was born in Drogheda and grew up there and in Monasterboice, Co. Louth. Her debut collection of poetry, Before You, was published by Dedalus Press in 2012 and highly commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2013. Her second collection, Some Lives, was published in 2020 and noted as a Book of the Year by The Irish Times and The Irish Independent. She is the recipient of three Arts Council Bursary awards, most recently in 2021. Her poems have been widely anthologised, appearing in The Forward Book of Poetry 2013, Windharp: Poems of Ireland Since 1916, and Queering The Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry. In 2022 she co-edited Romance Options (Dedalus Press), an anthology of contemporary love poems from Ireland. She lives in Vienna.Stephen Sexton’s first book, If All the World and Love Were Young was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.  He was awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2020. He was the winner of the National Poetry Competition in 2016 and the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. Cheryl’s Destinies was published in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.

Mícheál McCann is a poet from Derry. His poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly and Poetry Ireland Review. He has published pamphlets of poems, most recently Waking Light (Skein Press) and Keeper (14publishing). He was a co-editor of Hold Open the Door (UCD Press), Trumpet (Poetry Ireland) and is a founder and editor of Outburst Arts’ catflap magazine. He lives in Belfast where he is completing a PhD in the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.