User:Beckett2021/sandbox

Jackie Gorman is a poet from the midlands of Ireland. She works in science communications and has been extensively published in Poetry Ireland Review, The Honest Ulsterman , The Lonely Crowd , The Galway Review and other journals. Born in Coosan, Athlone, she has a background in community development and has worked in Ireland and West Africa. In recent years she has worked in public engagement with science with a particular focus on those who might be least likely to engage with science. She is also a certified Amherst Writing Method workshop leader and she credits her experience with this method with learning to trust her own voice. Her work has been included in anthologies edited by Noel Monahan and Alan McMonagle and in 2018 she was included in the Blue Nib Poetry Anthology. Her work benefitted from early mentoring by the poets Noel Monahan and Thomas McCarthy and she has often acknowledged this in interviews. She was received mentoring from Enda Wyley through the Words Ireland programme, which she has said was important in her development as a writer.

In 2015, she undertook work with a non verbal visual artist Brendan Duffy and they produced together an exhibition and book "Can You Hear What I See ?", a series of images and poetry inspired by those images. She has a strong interest in ekphrastic practice and she has also recently produced poems for the Mary Evans Picture Library, London. She has also written haiku for the haiku wheel developed by the artist Nickie Hayden for a Bloomsday exhibition in 2017.

In 2021, she was commissioned by Festival in a Van, a national initiative to bring poetry to communities to write a poem for Westmeath and she wrote a poem called "Saffron Light" which explored taking opportunities in life, even if you are older. She has been commended in the Goldsmith Poetry Competition, the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Awards and the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year Award. She has been long-listed for the Erbacce Poetry Prize, the Africa Day Poetry Prize, the Allingham Poetry Prize, the Dermot Healy Poetry Prize and others. She was short-listed for the Cinnamon Press Prize in 2017 and in the same year received the Listowel Writers' Week Single Poem Award, which was judged by Harry Clifton. She was part of the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series in 2017, a national programme to profile and support emerging poets in Ireland. In 2018, she completed a Masters in Poetry Studies at the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies at Dublin City University, where she had a particular interest in ecopoetics and poetry and psychoanalysis.

Her debut collection "The Wounded Stork" was published in 2019 by the Onslaught Press, UK and was launched at Listowel Writers' Week by Thomas McCartney. A review in Poetry Ireland Review by Martin Dyar described it as an "engrossing and ecologically attuned debut." The same review also praised the "a mature sense of poems being integration of lyrical and prosaic parts." The author Nuala O'Connor has described her poetry as "beautiful and strong work."

In 2021, she had a poem and a short essay included in "Hold Open the Door", an anthology edited by Frank Ormsby et al for UCD Press and received an Arts Council of Ireland Award to develop new work about Westmeath, informed by an ecopoetic approach.