We had a wonderful time at both the launches for Issue 18: in the All Saints Heritage Centre in Clonbur and in Galway City Library. Karen J McDonnell was our launcher in Clonbur and Orla Fay was our launcher in Galway, with Susan Millar DuMars as MC. Contributors read at both of these events and photos are now up on our social media.
We are delighted to be working with the Cúirt International Festival of Literature and Over the Edge Literary Events to run the Open Window project again this year. Four writers will be selected from the submissions to be mentored by an established poet or writer. From these writers, one will then be selected by the Cúirt judging panel to read at the Over the Edge New Writers Showcase during Cúirt next year (2024).
Skylight 47 will support this project by selecting the writers to be mentored and pairing them with the most suitable partners from the mentoring panel. The mentees will be writers from under-represented communities, who are now emerging onto Ireland’s contemporary literature scene. At the showcase a dedicated space will be given to these exciting, fresh voices to help share their talents with a wider audience. Our overall winner from 2022 was Flávia Simas, while Helen Flynn won in 2023. Both these writers had fantastic readings at the Showcase.
We are now already starting to look for writers and poets who can be mentored through the Open Window project in preparation for the 2024 New Writers Showcase!
How can you take part? Take a look at the project inclusion criteria below:
If you fulfill all these criteria, then please follow the guidelines below:
Issue 17 has now been printed and will be launched on Thursday 25 May at 6 pm in Galway City Library by poet Breda Spaight, who will be our featured reader.
Contributors from the current issue will also be reading. Susan Millar DuMars of Over the Edge Literary Events will MC for the evening.
Everyone is welcome!
You can order your new issue here.
Submissions are now open for our next issue of Skylight 47. You can send in your poems until 19 February. Find more information here.
We had a fabulous launch of Issue 16 by poet Anne Rouse on Thursday in Galway City Library as part of the Over The Edge literary reading. This was an exciting and well-attended event – our first live launch since before Covid. Here’s Anne launching the issue:
And here’s some of the crowd:
For more photos of the event see our Facebook page.
As mentioned in our previous post, Skylight 47 will work with Over the Edge to create a dedicated reading stream within their annual New Writer Showcase event, which takes place during Cúirt. This reading stream will be called Open Window. It will provide a platform for writers or poets who identify as under-represented, giving their work an audience as part of a well-attended literary event and under the banner of the highly respected international festival that is Cúirt.
Flávia Simas was selected as our first reader for this event for the 2022 New Writer Showcase.
We are now already starting to look for writers and poets who can be mentored through the Open Window project in preparation for the 2023 New Writer Showcase! Those chosen for this project will take part in our writing development programme. This will include one-to-one mentoring in preparation for submitting work to Cúirt for the 2023 Showcase. One writer or poet will then be selected by Cúirt to read at the event.
There are a couple of ways in which we are gathering candidates for the project and the first is through submissions for Issue 16.
How can you take part? Take a look at the project inclusion criteria below:
If you fulfill all of these criteria, then follow our submission guidelines for Issue 16, including one to two sentences in your bio about why you think you would be suitable for this project. We look forward to hearing from you and reading your work!
We are delighted to be working with the Cúirt International Festival of Literature and Over the Edge to introduce a new stream of readers at the Over the Edge New Writers Showcase at Cúirt each year. Skylight 47 will support this event by providing a shortlist of writers to the organisers. These will be writers from under-represented communities, who are now emerging onto Ireland’s contemporary literature scene. At the showcase a dedicated space will be given to these exciting, fresh voices to help share their talents with a wider audience.
For this year’s Cúirt festival, we created a shortlist of such writers that had previously submitted to Skylight 47 and invited them to submit work for selection by Cúirt. We are delighted to announce Flavia Simas as the initiative’s inaugural reader at the 2022 showcase. Congratulations Flavia!
We hope to make the showcase stream part of a longer-term initiative that will expand in scope over the next couple of years. This will potentially include 1:1 mentoring and workshops with groups or individuals who fall within the initiative’s criteria. We are really looking forward to working with these writers and hearing them read at future events during Cúirt.
We will release further information about the longer-term project as soon as details are confirmed.
Deirdre Hines has launched Skylight 47 for us in great style, and we thank her very much. We love the way she began:
It was when Dante began writing his Divine Comedy that the word ‘launch’ came into being. The pathway to the hallowed halls of many literary magazines can be as difficult to traverse as Dante’s nine circles of hell. But there is one magazine that has as its core ethos an equality of access that is democratic in its equalities of participation and outcomes. That magazine is Skylight 47, which since its inception nine years ago has been in the vanguard of what Heaney refers to in his poem of the same name:
‘But when the slates came off, extravagant sky entered and held surprise wide open.’
We know you will be surprised and delighted with Issue 15. You can buy your copy here.
You can buy your copy now.
We are launching on Thursday 20 January at 6.30pm on Zoom. Poet and playwright Deirdre Hines will do the honours for us.
Please come and join us. We will be delighted to see you.
You can join the launch here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7389013549
Meeting ID: 738 901 3549
SKYLIGHT 47 poetry 