Eamonn Wall: Transculturalism, Hybridity and the New Irish in America

Abstract

Eamonn Wall, the poet and critic, was born in Enniscorthy, Ireland, in 1955. He emigrated to the United States in 1982 to attend graduate school. He was associate professor of English at Creighton University from 1992-2000, and director of the Creighton Irish Summer School. He is currently the Smurfit-Stone Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Missouri-St Louis. Wall has published eight volumes of poetry and regularly writes book reviews and articles on Irish and Irish-American literature for newspapers and journals, including The Washington Post and The Review of Contemporary Poetry. Wall is a leading member of the New Irish Writers movement, a group dedicated to reassessing and updating representations of the Irish emigrant experience. He is also the author of a study of the Irish diaspora in America entitled From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills (2000), which was the co-winner of the Durkan Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies for “excellence in scholarship” (A. Ní Éigeartaigh 2008: 905).