Hi!

My name is Éireann Lorsung (you say my first name just like “Erin”, but it really is spelled that way, and yes, I’ve had it since birth). I am a writer, teacher, and maker of things, currently living in Dublin, Ireland. You can find information about my written work on this page. I collect my public projects, my visual arts work, and information about my teaching life elsewhere on this site. If you would like to hear about classes I’m teaching, events or readings I’m part of (or organizing), and new publications, please sign up for my mailing list. 

 

My writing life

I write across the three major genres and I make things for installation, viewing, and performance. My work as a whole arises out of a longstanding practice of careful attention which I bring to bear equally on structures, texts, and my surroundings. Classroom teaching is an essential element of my creative life, and I am grateful to the students I’ve worked with for their generosity in thinking and making together.

Artworks and art processes are frequent subjects across my writing, and my reviews and exhibition texts have appeared in the US and UK. The twinned act of attending to and making images, a gift given to me in childhood, remains a dominant thread in my literary process and production. Recently my graphic essay “Being Here” was included in the Ignatz Award–nominated anthology HOME; a second graphic essay is forthcoming as part of an edited collection with Bloomsbury Academic. These comics are one branch of a larger body of work incorporating image and text, which includes a yearlong project in weekly public writing that grew out of a practice of daily walking, annotation, field recording, and photography (sample essays are available here, here and here).

The relation between images and text is central to my 2020 collection, The Century, which thinks through my experience as an immigrant to understand my relation to the history of the U.S., the E.U., colonialism, and white dominance. The often rangy poems in this book seek what one of the opening poems calls “a language more open//than the language of forms, more/spacious than the language poetry/can be”. As I worked to think about spectation, social forms, whiteness, power, and empire, the poems demanded a syntax that could not only consider images but include them. The question of an expanded image-text syntax continues to occupy my thinking: what happens when non-linguistic objects occupy the page alongside language? How can images operate in texts (besides functioning illustratively)? Over the past four years, these questions have brought me to a deepening fascination with concrete poetry, artists’ books, Fluxus event scores, performance, and process art more generally.

 

Just the facts

Here are some facts about my writing life: I was a 2016 NEA Fellow in creative writing (prose).  My first book, Music for Landing Planes By, was named a ‘new and noteworthy’ book by Poets & Writers. My second, Her book (a poem from it can be found at the Poetry Society of America), came out from Milkweed in 2013 and was beautifully reviewed in Zzyzzyva; a chapbook, Sweetbriar, came out the same year.  My third book, The Century, which LitHub named as one of their “most anticipated” 2020 titles, came out in October 2020 and has been reviewed in Ploughshares, the Portland (ME) Press-Herald, the Boston Globe, and Publishers Weekly, among other places. The Century also won the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. My fourth collection with Milkweed, Pink Theory!, will be out in 2026, and Pattern-book will be published by Carcanet Press (UK) in 2025. My writing is represented by The Wylie Agency.

 

Current projects

I am in the early stages of a book-length work of nonfiction I’m calling All Together Now: Artists, Classrooms and Collaboration, and that considers the lives and work of Corita Kent, John Cage, June Jordan, and George Maciunas alongside my own teaching, collaborative, and artistic practices. Part teaching philosophy, part story about artistic collaboration in the second half of the 20th century, part ecstatic guide to living an ordinary life, All Together Now opens up questions about what happens when we approach the work of artmaking—or sense-making—as something we do together. The richly collaborative lives of these four writers and artists bring me into a consideration of the radical possibilities that reconsidering artmaking as a collective act may offer.

A departure from my recent, more open-field poetry, Pattern-book (Carcanet, 2025) returns to the forms of the anglophone canon (sonnet, couplet) and the lyric mode. Pattern-book is about the patterns of family life, grief, time, art. The poems are attentive to places where I learned to think about poetry: schools, universities, friendships, the kitchen table, the garden. They also attend to the gaps present in any pattern of knowing, and to  the places depiction falls short. How can language cross that gap? How do I know what I experience, if I only have language to think with? Where does the “I” who says “I know” come from?

Pink Theory!, which will be my fourth collection with Milkweed when it is published in 2026, takes Toni Cade Bambara’s assertion that “the role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible” seriously—as a prompt for self-criticism and as an aesthetic challenge. This collection departs from Hope Mirrlees’ PARIS, the modernisms of Louis Zukovsky, and Fanny Howe’s essay “Bewilderment” and believes that both walking and reading teach us how to live and write. The poems make a dérive through 20th-century French philosophy, academic labor, handiwork, and synesthesia, en route to a vision of poetry as imbued with philosophy, of philosophy as part of everyday life, and of everyday life as shared with all living-thinking beings. Pink Theory! is lighthearted, playful, and sincere about beauty as well as about the liberating possibilities of solidarity and of joy. It’s also full of intertext: snippets of music, fragments of poetry, quoted forms and borrowed patterning, a reminder that thought itself—right down to the alphabet—is shared, and of our roles in the shared making of the world.

 

The future

I tend to work on a number of things at once, collecting and keeping piles of scraps for years before a book comes into being. Things under the surface include a collection about water use, landscape, the US empire, and Christianity; poems that deal with flax cultivation, rural life, time, migration, and repetition and come from the years I lived in Belgium; and a collection of essays about the garden as form and site of thinking. As I have been since 2011 or so, I’m still working on a novel entitled 1873 that pivots doubly around the 2011 Touhoku earthquake and tsunami, and the Meiji-period (1873) adoption of the Gregorian calendar in place of the historical Japanese calendar.

 

Samples of work

I made a few recordings of poems and put them here, along with PDF copies. Parts of 1873 are online; here is “A Matter of Public Record” and here is “List of survivors” and here is “Procedure for certification of death.” Most recently, The Yale Review spoils the end of the book (almost) by printing “How After the Quake You Returned to What Was Lost“.

 

My professional life, in brief

As of June 2022, I am an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, Ireland’s national research university, where I teach MA and undergraduate poetry classes as well as, in 2023 and 2024, a class on attention and literary nonfiction. For the 2021-22 academic year, I was Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Simpson College (Iowa, US) where I taught a seminar on contemporary nonfiction, writing workshops across three genres, and other undergraduate courses. Previously I taught in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Program at Emerson College (MA, US), was Faculty of the Baccalaureate at Bard College (NY, US), where I taught Life Writing, taught a year-long observational practice workshop via Maine Media College + Workshops, and was Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing (Nonfiction) at the University of Maine – Farmington (US). I’ve also taught at universities in Belgium and the UK. If you’d like to get an idea of my approach to teaching, you can listen to me give a talk about why I value failure here. My teaching is more fully discussed here.

Before returning to the US in 2018, I was living in Belgium, where I ran a micropress and a tiny residency space for writers and artists. (N.b.: If you’re here to find out the status of those projects, the short answer is I don’t know. MIEL will be relocating eventually and then come out of hibernation. Dickinson House may irrupt in the future in a different form. I do love both projects, but they’re not compatible with teaching for me right now.) 

 

Biographical information

I was born and grew up in Minneapolis, MN (US), and did my BAs (English, Japanese) and MFA (Creative Writing–Poetry; minor in Studio Arts), at the University of Minnesota. I had really excellent teachers and peers over those seven years, some of whom are still my best readers. During my MFA I spent time at the Scuola Internazionale de Grafica in Venice, Italy, where a Judd Fellowship provided me with the time to work on prints and poems.

In 2006 I moved to Dole, France, where I taught English at Lycée Charles Nodier. In 2007 I moved to Nottingham, UK, where I did my PhD in Critical Theory, writing about love, affect, reading, and deconstruction. My doctoral thesis was about forms of knowing: scholarship, writing, reading, thinking, feeling, artmaking, worship, and crying. From 2012-2018 I lived in Belgium; from 2017-2021 in Maine (US); from 2021-22 in Iowa; and since 2022 I have lived in Dublin, Ireland.

Organize your own book tour

In 2013, I organized a ten-city tour in support of the publication of my second collection, Her book. Information about how I did that is here.

Mailing list

From March 2023 until March 2024, I posted an essay each week, which you can read in your browser or receive as an email. These will disappear beginning in August 2024 when Abundant Number, a new project, begins. If you would like to hear about classes I’m teaching, events or readings I’m part of (or organizing), and new publications, please sign up for my mailing list. 

Thank you for visiting.