Femina Culpa: poetry, crime and justice

Name: Femina Culpa: poetry, crime and justice
Start: 2025-12-03T19:00:00+00:00
Location: Down County Museum, BT30 6AH Downpatrick, United Kingdom

Schedule

Wed, 03 Dec, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC+00:00

Location

Down County Museum, BT30 6AH Downpatrick, United Kingdom | Downpatrick, NI

Three local poets Linda McKenna, Emma McKervey and Milena Williamson will read poems from their latest collections which have all been inspired by real life cases from history. Using archival sources, they have created poetry which reflects on the stories of ordinary nineteenth century women caught up in the criminal justice system.
About the collections:
Linda McKenna’s second collection, Four Thousand Keys, (Doire Press, 2024), is inspired by the case of Elizabeth Dunham who, in 1819, was tried at the Old Bailey for the theft of the keys of the Bank of England (worth 5 shillings). During a search of her lodgings about four thousand keys to a range of public buildings around London were discovered. They included the keys to the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the Royal College of Physicians, the Greenwich Watch Tower, the Guildhall, the Foundling Hospital, the Temple Stairs, Maidstone Gaol and others. She was found guilty but non compos mentis and imprisoned first in Newgate before being sent to Bedlam.

Emma McKervey’s latest collection, Highland Boundary Fault, (Turas Press, 2024), looks at an old family story of her great grandparents, whose love letters between Greenock and the Outer Hebrides were intercepted by a jealous village girl and resulted in a Sheriff’s Court Case in the 1890s.

Milena Williamson's debut collection, Into the Night that Flies So Fast, (Dedalus Press, 2024) brings the reader on a journey to investigate the life and death of Bridget Cleary, in 1895 burned to death by her family on suspicion of being a fairy changeling.

About the writers:
Linda McKenna is originally from Dublin but has lived in Downpatrick in County Down for many years. She won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing in 2018 and the title poem of her first collection, In the Museum of Misremembered Things, (Doire Press 2020), won the An Post/Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year in 2020. She has worked in heritage and museums for nearly 30 years.

Emma McKervey studied at Dartington College of Arts. Her award-winning work is widely published across both islands, and she has worked for over two decades as an arts facilitator. Her debut collection was published by Doire Press. She is currently working towards an MRes in the Seamus Heaney Centre at QUB.
Milena Williamson has a PhD in poetry from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. A recipient of the Eric Gregory Award, she is the author of the pamphlet Charm for Catching a Train (Green Bottle Press) and the book Into the Night that Flies So Fast (Dedalus Press).