Woman Scream 2020-Ireland-Cork

Ó Bhéal featured guests for the Woman Scream Festival 2020, 10th anniversary were Fióna Bolger and Moyra Donaldson. The event took place at The Hayloft Bar and had Poetry-Films and started at 8pm, Five Word challenge at 9pm, featured guests from 9.45pm and open-mic from 11pm.

Fióna Bolger recently launched her first poetry collection, a compound of words (Yoda Press, 2019). She lives between Ireland and India. Her work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Southword, The Brown Critique, Poetry Bus, The Chattahoochee Review and others. She co-edited All the Worlds Between (Yoda Press, Delhi, 2017), a poetry project between Ireland and India.

Her grimoire was published in 2015, Geometry of Love Between the Elements by PB Press. She is a co-ordinator of Dublin Writers’ Forum and a member of the creative team of Outlandish Theatre Platform. Fióna is currently working towards a PhD at DCU entitled ‘Searching for Poems in the Cracks Between Borders’.

Moyra Donaldson is a poet and creative writing facilitator from Co Down. She has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Carnivorous (Doire Press, 2019) which was recently nominated for Poetry Wales – Book of the Year by poet Kerry Hardie, who described it as ‘completely fearless yet deeply reverent’. Ciaran Carson described the poems as ‘searching, intimate, sometimes harrowing – recognising the capacity of language to transform ourselves’. Her awards include the Women’s National Poetry Competition, The Allingham Award, Cuirt New Writing Award, North West Words Poetry Award, the Belfast Year of the Writer Award and in 2019 she received a Major Artist Award from the Arts Council Northern Ireland.

Moyra has collaborated with a number of visual artists and in 2018, she worked with Wexford artist, Paddy Lennon to produce Blood Horses, a limited edition publication of artworks and poems. Blood Horses tells the stories of The Byerley Turk, Darley Arabian and Godolphin Barb, the three founding stallions of the thoroughbred horse. It also explores the profound link between humans and horses. Her poems have featured on BBC Radio and television and on American national radio and television and she has read at festivals in Europe, Canada and America.