Kerrin McCadden's new collection of poems called American Wake is made of the stuff of life --subjects like family, divorce, raising children, love and even her brother's tragic death by drug overdose are poignantly bound together by her strong Irish Heritage and her family's immigrant story. American Wake, is an actual term that refers to a kind of "Irish wake-style" farewell party that was thrown for Irish families the night before before they set sail for America. A lot of us dabble in ancestry and build family trees, but Kerrin McCadden has made it a way of life. Kerrin is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow and has received the Sustainable Arts Foundation Writing Award, the Vermont Book Award, the New Issues Poetry Prize, and the Button Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, New England Review, and more. Her books are American Wake (2021), Keep This To Yourself (2020), Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes (2014). Her mentors are poets David Budbill and Ellen Bryant Voigt.
MUSIC CREDITS:
Liz Carroll, The Drunken Sailor
Liz Carroll, A Day and An Age