Nurturing Hope: Poetry, Peace and Possibility

Join Northern Irish theologian, poet and host of the Poetry Unbound podcast Pádraig Ó Tuama, internationally acclaimed Palestinian-American "wandering" poet, educator and editor Naomi Shihab Nye, and Texas Poet Laureate and Trinity University Professor Jenny Browne for an unforgettable evening of shared words and experiences of living and writing in bifurcated communities, and the particular power of poetry to hold complexity, nuance and hope in times of uncertainty.

This event is part of Nurturing Hope San Antonio, a consortium of universities working to support peace and reconciliation in partnership with the Rotary Club of San Antonio and the Corrymeela Community in Northern Ireland.

is one of Ireland's most prominent poets, a peace builder and theologian. He holds degrees in divinity and theology from the Maryvale Institute, Queen’s University Belfast, and the University of Glasgow. He is a staff poet with On Being and hosts the podcast, with over 10 million downloads. His published work is in the fields of poetry, anthology, essay, memoir, theology and conflict. Profiled in The New Yorker, Pádraig’s poems have been featured in Poetry Ireland Review, Ploughshares, Academy of American Poets, Harvard Review, New England Review, , and the Kenyon Review. Pádraig has told stories at The Moth, has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, has presented programmes on poetry and language for BBC Radio 4; and has extended interviews with On Being, with Kim Hill on Radio NZ, and Soul Search on Radio National (Australia). In addition, he has interviewed poets and public figures including former President of Ireland Mary McAleese, Fady Joudah, Hanif Abdurraqib, The Edge, Sarah Perry, Joy Harjo, Billy Collins and Martin Hayes.

From 2014 to 2019 Ó Tuama led the Corrymeela Community in Ballycastle, Northern Ireland, the country’s most-known peace and reconciliation institute. Corrymeela now partners with universities in San Antonio and the Rotary Club of San Antonio to host the Seeds of Hope International Peace Leadership Academy and serves and the inspiration for the 4-university peace cooperative Nurturing Hope San Antonio.

is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Grace Notes: Poems about Family (HarperCollins, 2024); Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (Greenwillow Books, 2020); The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2019); Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (Greenwillow Books, 2018); Transfer (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2011); You and Yours (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; and 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, 2002), a collection of new and selected poems. She is also the author of several books of poetry and fiction for children, including Habibi (Simon Pulse, 1997), for which she received the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1998.

Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. About her work, the poet William Stafford has said, “Her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life.”

is the author of three collections of poems, At Once, The Second Reason and Dear Stranger and two chapbooks, Welcome to Freetown and Texas, Being. A former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, she has received the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and two creative writing fellowships from the Texas Writers League. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Garden and Gun, Oxford American, The Nation, The New York Times and Tin House. She was the 2018 Poet Laureate of the State of Texas and the Distinguished Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing at Queens University, Belfast Northern Ireland in Spring 2020.

A longtime arts advocate, Professor Browne has taught poetry classes through the San Antonio Housing Authority, Arts San Antonio, Gemini Ink, and at the Good Samaritan Center. In the summer of 2011, she was selected by the University of Iowa International Writers Program and the U.S. State Department to travel to the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya to teach poetry in the camp's secondary schools.

Host or Publisher Trinity University School of Arts and Humanities