Paul Muldoon to Host Irish Rep's REMEMBERING SEAMUS, 11/4

Off-Broadway's award-winning Irish Repertory Theatre announces that it will pay tribute to Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet, playwright and lecturer Seamus Heaney (April 13, 1939 - August 30, 2013) with REMEMBERING SEAMUS: A CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE AND WORK OF Seamus Heaney which will take place on Monday, November 4th at 7 PM at the Irish Repertory Theatre (132 West 22nd Street).

The evening will be hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, and special guests will include author Colum McCann, Loretta Brennan Glucksman, and Jean Kennedy Smith, the former United States Ambassador to Ireland, among other luminaries from the literary and theatrical worlds (TBA).

This special event is free and open to the public, but reservations must be made in advance, either online at www.irishrep.org or by calling the Irish Rep box-office at 212-727-2737 (4-ticket maximum per order).

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). Born in Castledawson, County Derry, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney earned a teacher's certificate in English at St. Joseph's College in Belfast and in 1963 took a position as a lecturer in English at that school. While at St. Joseph's he began to write, joining a poetry workshop with Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and others under the guidance of Philip Hobsbaum. In 1965 he married Marie Devlin, and the following year he published Death of a Naturalist. He produced numerous collections of poetry, including Human Chain (2010), District and Circle (2006), Opened Ground (1999, New York Times Notable Book of the Year), The Spirit Level (1996), Selected Poems 1966-1987 (1990), and Sweeney Astray (1983). He also wrote several volumes of criticism, including The Redress of Poetry (1995). Heaney's most recent translation was Beowulf (2000), which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. He is also co-translator, with Stanislaw Baranczak, of Laments: Poems of Jan Kochanowski, and co-author, with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott, of a collection of essays entitled Homage to Robert Frost. In June of 2012, Heaney was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry. He was also a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1989 to 1994. In 1995 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Heaney was a resident of Dublin from 1976 to 2013. Beginning in 1981 he also spent part of each year teaching at Harvard University, where in 1984 he was elected the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Seamus Heaney passed away at age 74 in Dublin, Ireland, on August 30, 2013.

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College. Paul Muldoon's main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), andMaggot (2010). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. Other recent awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry. He has been described byThe Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War."

The Irish Repertory Theatre, co-founded in 1988 by Artistic Director Charlotte Moore and Producing Director Ciarán O'Reilly, provides a context for understanding the contemporary Irish-American experience through evocative works of theater, music, and dance. This mission is accomplished by staging the works of Irish and Irish-American classic and contemporary playwrights, encouraging the development of new works focused on the Irish and Irish-American experience, and producing the works of other cultures interpreted through the lens of an Irish sensibility. Ms. Moore and Mr. O'Reilly received a 2013 Outer Critics Circle Special Achievement Award in recognition of Irish Repertory Theatre's twenty-five years of producing outstanding theatre. Irish Repertory Theatre begins its 26th season in October with a revival of Sean O'Casey's JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK, directed by Charlotte Moore, and the New York premiere of A MIND-BENDING EVENING OF BECKETT, directed by Bob Flanagan.

REMEMBERING SEAMUS: A CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE AND WORK OF Seamus Heaney, hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, will take place on Monday, November 4th at 7 PM at the Irish Repertory Theatre (132 West 22nd Street). The special event is free and open to the public, but reservations must be made in advance, either online at www.irishrep.org or by calling the Irish Rep box-office at 212-727-2737 (4-ticket maximum per order).

Pictured: Seamus Heaney

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