PAULA MEEHAN was born in Dublin where she still lives. She was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and at Eastern Washington University. She has published five previous collections of poetry and received many awards for her work including the Denis Devlin Award of the Irish Arts Council (An Chonthairle Ealafon) for Dharmakaya, which Carcanet published in 2000. She has also written plays - for stage (for both children and adults) and for radio - and held a creative writing fellowship at University College, Dublin. Meehan has worked with inner city communities and conducted workshops in prisons. JODY ALLEN RANDOLPH was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at University College Dublin before earning her doctorate in British and American Literature from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She served as Assistant Dean of the British Studies at Oxford Programme at St. John's College, Oxford and has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, University College Dublin, and Westmont College in Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching specialities lie in twentieth-century and contemporary poetry, Irish literature and Anglophone poetry. Her essays and interviews have appeared regularly on both sides of the Atlantic.
