Experience words and music from around the globe at the World Poetry Salon, a new series presented in partnership with Limelight Poetry, a local nonprofit dedicated to promoting world poetry. Each event features readings by a celebrated poet set to live music by a musician of the same cultural background.

This salon will feature a reading by poet Colm Tóibín accompanied by musician Martin Hayes. A printout will be available for attendees to follow along with Tóibín’s poetry during the reading. Following the reading, Tóibín will be interviewed by event host Leonard Schwartz.

About the Artists:

Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of eleven novels, two collections of stories, and a volume of poetry, Vinegar Hill. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Times Literary Supplement. In 2000/2001, he was a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. In 2021, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

Praised by the Irish Times as a musician with an “insatiable appetite for adventure”, Martin Hayes is regarded as one of the most significant talents to emerge in the world of Irish traditional music. He is the founder of the musical supergroup The Gloaming, The Common Ground Ensemble, and the Martin Hayes Quartet. He is the artistic director of Masters of Tradition, an annual festival in Cork, Ireland,and a co-curator for the Marble Sessions at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, Ireland.

Leonard Schwartz is the author of numerous books of poetry, including, most recently, Flacofolio (with artist Heide Hatry), Actualities I: Transparent, to the Stone, Actualities II and III: Two Burned Hotels, and Actualities IV/V Comic Earth (2021, 2022, 2023, Goats & Compasses). Heavy Sublimation (Talisman House, 2018) and Salamander: A Bestiary (Chax Press, 2017), with painter Simon Carr, are also out and about. His work in poetics The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (University of Arkansas Press, 2016), is inclusive of poetry, essays, and interviews. Other titles include If (Talisman House, 2012), and At Element (2011), which explore the idea of an eco-poetics, as well as The Library of Seven Readings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008). He edited and co-translated Benjamin Fondane’s Cine- Poems and Other, with New York Review Books. From 2003 to 2018 he produced and hosted the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics.