Poet and scholar Eamonn Wall was born and raised in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland. He has lived in the United States since 1982. He was educated at University College Dublin and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and earned his PhD in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Wall wrote poems and stories from a young age but, as he tells David Gardiner, he “needed to experience something deeper of the world to be able to write seriously.” He published his first book, Dyckman-200th Street, when he was nearly forty.
Wall is the author of eight collections of poetry, all published by Ireland’s Salmon Poetry: My Aunts at Twilight Poker (2023), Junction City: New and Selected Poems 1990–2015 (2015), Sailing Lake Mareotis (2011), A Tour of Your Country (2008), Refuge at De Soto Bend (2004), The Crosses (2000), Iron Mountain Road (1997), and Dyckman-200th Street (1994). He has also published four poetry chapbooks: The Tamed Goose (The Hale Press, 1990), Fire Escape (Sunken-Isle Press, 1988), Fragments and Other Poems (Gorey Arts Festival, 1981), and The Celtic Twilight (Gorey Arts Festival, 1974). His poems have appeared in journals including Prairie Schooner, The Shop, Poetry Ireland Review, TriQuarterly, Crab Orchard Review, and River Styx, as well as in The Irish Times and in multiple anthologies.
Wall has published three prose books: From Oven Lane to Sun Prairie: in Search of Irish America (Arlen House/Syracuse University Press, 2019), Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), and From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), winner of the Michael J. Durkan Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies. His critical writing and reviews on Irish, Irish American, and American writers have appeared in The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, New Hibernia Review, Irish Literary Supplement, The Irish Times, South Carolina Review, An Sionnach, and other periodicals. In 2013, he edited two volumes of essays by Irish poet James Liddy, On American Literature and Diasporas and On Irish Literature and Identities, for Arlen House and Syracuse University Press.
From 2005 to 2007, Wall served as president of the American Conference for Irish Studies. He was vice-president of Irish American Writers and Artists from 2014 to 2018. In 2014, he was the Charles Heimbold Chair in Irish Studies at Villanova University, and in 2023, he was named a fellow in non-fiction at the Writers’ Institute of the CUNY Graduate Center. A documentary on his life as a writer, Eamonn Wall: Your Rivers Have Trained You, was directed by Paul O’Reilly and released in 2014.
Eamonn Wall has lived in St. Louis, Missouri, since 2000. He is Smurfit-Stone Professor of Irish Studies and Professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He teaches courses in Irish, Irish-American, and British literature, directs the university’s Irish Summer School in Galway, and curates the Irish and Irish American Lectures and Concerts Series for UMSL Global. He and his wife, Drucilla Wall, have two adult children.
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More Eamonn Wall
Text: Read five poems by Wall at Rochford Street Review
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Photo by Marissa Metzler.