Atlantic Currents

Atlantic Currents: Cork & Lowell Writers

BOOK LAUNCH

5.30pm, Council Chamber, City Hall

Come along to the launch of this new anthology, meet the Editors, hear about Cork-Lowell Literary connections and listen to some of the writers reading from their work. Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell brings together sixty-five writers from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean whose stories, poems, essays, songs, and parts of novels come to us in familiar voices. Lowell in Massachusetts, is famously the home of Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road. Like Cork, it has a rich literary tradition and, like Cork, is equally committed to the values and goals of UNESCO’s Learning Cities programme. With the objective of strengthening connections between these two communities and to create new learning links, this newly published anthology - an expression of our shared connections - is launched this evening. Atlantic Currents is published by Loom Press of Lowell. There will also be a writers’ exchange. The idea is to introduce the two cities to each other and so the anthology includes the histories of Lowell and Cork, together with work by established and emerging poets, short story writers and novelists, journalists, prose writers, and personal responses to life in both cities. Spurred by a desire to make a sturdy bond between two historic cities whose modern

resurgence has been driven in large part by commitments to lifelong experiential learning, the organizers of Cork Learning City and Lowell: City of Learning began collaborating in the spirit of UNESCO’s Learning Cities network. With this anthology, the connecting thread is made stronger through the now entwined writing and reading in both places. Come along and meet writers and the Editor from Cork, Tina Neylon, former Books Editor of The Irish Examiner & Co-ordinator of the Cork Lifelong Learning Festival from 2004 to 2017, with one of the two Lowell Editors, John Wooding, Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Lowell and co-ordinator of Lowell City of Learning. Cork’s connections with Lowell date back to 2016. Since the Cork Lifelong Learning Festival began in 2004 and, in particular, since UNESCO’s recognition of Cork as a Learning City in 2015 there have been many contacts with other cities interested in following in its footsteps. Some have founded their own festivals of lifelong learning, others are developing initiatives to foster a culture of learning in their cities – among them Limerick, Belfast, Dublin, Derry, Swansea, Wyndham in Australia, Burnaby in Canada, and recently Lowell in Massachusetts, USA.