James Ryan is Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin (UCD). His fourth novel, South of the Border (2008), from which he will read on April 3, is set in the Irish Midlands during World War II. Ryan's work explores the rural Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s and the conflicted terrain of generation and culture.

 

Martin Roper is a Fulbright Scholar and has an MFA from the University of Iowa. He teaches creative writing at NYU and directs the University of Iowa’s summer program in Dublin. He is the author of the novel Gone (Henry Holt 2002 / Picador 2003), and his work has appeared in The New Yorker and been short-listed for a Sunday Tribune/Hennessy Award. He will read from his second and still untitled novel, to be published in early 2009. Martin Roper was born and educated in Dublin.

 

Caroline Walsh is the literary editor of The Irish Times, the Irish newspaper of record. The daughter of eminent Irish short-story writer Mary Lavin, UConn's first ever creative writer-in-residence, Ms. Walsh has had long-standing ties with the Storrs community as she attended E.O. Smith High School for one academic year while her mother was at UConn.

 

Lucy McDiarmid is a Professor of English at Villanova University, and currently holds the Cloud Visiting Chair of English at the College of William and Mary. She is a former Fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library, and the author of five books on Irish literary topics, including The Irish Art of Controversy (Cornell UP, 2005). She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and reviews Irish poetry and non-fiction for the TLS.

 

 

Tony Tracy is Associate Director of the Huston School of Film and Digital Media at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). His areas of expertise include film education, and contemporary Spanish and European cinema. Formerly Senior Education Officer at the Irish Film Institute, he is currently Associate Editor for Film and Film Culture, film editor for Estudios Irlandeses, and Education Consultant for the Boston Irish Film Festival.

 

Stephanie Silber has worked with Playwrights Horizons and The Ensemble Studio Theatre. Silber has produced, written, and directed long-form documentaries which have aired on Court Television, the History Channel, and the Learning Channel. Her short film for the Sierra Club and Amnesty International, Environmentalists Under Fire, was recognized in 2000 with a Telly Award, and was screened at the Amnesty International Film Festival in Vancouver, 2002.

 

Victor Zimet has been awarded an Emmy for producing and directing a magazine segment on the victorious 1986 Mets for WNYC-TV. Prior to launching Home Team Productions with Stephanie Silber, he edited network specials including Street Stories with the late Ed Bradley, Eye to Eye with Connie Chung, and Public Eye with Bryant Gumbel, for which he received another Emmy nomination. In 2007 he co-produced Random Lunacy, a film about his friends, The Flying Neutrinos, whom he had discovered busking on a Times Square subway platform in 1986.