Events for the English Department

 

Mr. Mehaghan spoke in Pope Lecture Hall in February 2008. This event was run by both the English Department and the English Club.

John Menaghan has published two books, both with Salmon Poetry (Ireland). Kirkus Reviews describes his first book, All the Money in the World (1999), as “an auspicious beginning” and the poems therein as “humorous, ironic, erotic, neurotic, and tender both by turns & often simultaneously . . . quite wonderful.”    The Hudson Review calls his second book, She Alone (2006) "one of the best books of 2006," containing "fifty-odd lyrics, each in a different form, each handled with unobtrusive panache," "poetry with a human center," "smart and affecting," "utterly original," and "a book in which style and substance harmonize." And Midwest Book Review calls She Alone "a unique experience in epic poetry and enthusiastically recommended." 

 

Menaghan’s recent move into playwriting has seen his one-act play A Rumor of Rain performed at the Empty Stage Theater in Los Angeles (as part of an evening that included work by John Patrick Shanley and Neil Simon) and given staged readings at the ATHE theater conference in San Francisco, by the Women in Theatre group in Los Angeles, and as part of the New Works Festival at Loyola Marymount University. Two other one-acts, What? and Break of Day, have been given staged readings at Barnsdall Park in Hollywood, the latter directed by the author himself. And both A Rumor of Rain & his latest short play To Put Away Childish Things? have been selected for upcoming staged readings as part of “Script Tease 2007” in San Diego.

 

Menaghan is the winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize and other awards, and has published poems and articles in Irish, American, and Canadian journals. He has given readings in London, Paris, Debrecen (Hungary), around Ireland, and across the U.S. from New York to Honolulu.   He teaches literature and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he also serves as Director of both the Irish Studies & Summer in Ireland programs and runs the annual LMU Irish Cultural Festival. He is currently working on two full-length plays, one set in Berkeley, California, the other in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and a sequence of short plays on the theme of leaving and being left behind. His third volume of poetry is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in Fall 2009.