Poetry Reading by Petr Borkovec and Justin Quinn

On Wednesday morning, Czech poet Petr Borkovec and Irish poet Justin Quinn visited our class to read from their books and talk all things poetry.

Petr Borkovec is a Czech poet, prose writer, translator, and author of children’s books. He writes regular columns and short prose for magazines Full Moon, A2, czech radio station Vltava, iLiteratura and Slovak revue Fraktál. His most recent books are the short story collection Lido di Dante (2017), the poetry collection Herbarium to something worse (2018), the children’s book Every Thing Has Something to Do with Happiness (2018), the prose collection Petříček Sellier & Petříček Bellot (2019), the short stories Collect the Stick (2020; expanded edition 2022), and the poems for youth Blue Agave (2021). In 2022 he published Observation Exercises (Officina Praga).

Justin Quinn was born in Dublin, and educated there at Trinity College (BA & PhD). With David Wheatley, he was a founding editor of the Irish poetry magazine, Metre. His translations of the Czech poet Petr Borkovec, From the Interior, appeared in 2008 from Seren. He also lectures at the Department of English, Faculty of Education, University of West Bohemia. In 2017 his translations of Bohuslav Reynek, The Well at Morning: Selected Poems, 1925-1971, were published by Karolinum, with essays by Martin C. Putna and Jiří Šerých. His translations of Jan Zábrana’s poetry, The Lesser Histories, were published in 2022 by Karolinum/University of Chicago Press.

Internationally acclaimed poets, Petr and Justin are also good friends and often collaborate on their writing and translations. Their poetry reading was informal, full of banter, and deeply engaged in the possibilities of poetry across cultures.