Poetry Workshop with Molly Twomey: Writing the People We Love

About the Workshop

This generative workshop invites you to celebrate the loved ones who shape your world, be it a parent, a friend, a dog, or even a cherished barista. We will look to poets like Chen Chen, Safia Elhillo, and Mícheál McCann, who write with specificity and authenticity, transforming ordinary details into powerful and resonant poems. Through guided exercises, we will experiment with metaphor, list-making, and strange turns of phrase to move beyond cliché into the unique joy and complexity of our relationships. My hope is that you will surprise yourself, writing deeply into the experience of being someone’s sibling, child, or friend, and discover how that relationship has transformed your own sense of self.

About Molly Twomey

Molly Twomey grew up in Lismore, County Waterford, and now lives in Cork. Her debut poetry collection, Raised Among Vultures, was published in 2022 by The Gallery Press. It won the Southword Debut Collection Poetry Award and was shortlisted for both The Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection, and The Farmgate Café National Poetry Award. She was awarded the 2023 Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary and an Arts Council Literature Bursary in 2024 to work on her second collection, Chic to be Sad, published in 2025 by The Gallery Press. Twomey runs an online international poetry event, Just to Say, sponsored by Jacar Press. She holds an MA in Creative Writing and is currently a PhD candidate at University College Cork.

More about Molly's latest work

Chic to be Sad, The Gallery Press, July 2025.
Molly Twomey’s first collection, Raised Among Vultures, touched readers and listeners in uncommon ways. Reviewing it in Poetry Ireland’s Trumpet Annie Brown wrote that it ‘feels like a friend’. Chic to be Sad continues a young woman’s report from the front lines of experience. These fearless poems, rich in simile (a smile ‘wide / as a long weekend’) and striking detail, rest in ordinary settings — an ‘Online Staff Meeting’, an Aldi car park in Youghal. Framed between work that centres on a fire in her family home this book displays an even wider range than her debut — from ‘My Brother’s Friends Draw Dicks’, ‘The Mechanic Speaks to My Boyfriend Over My Head’ and ‘Why We Don’t Have Kids’ it reaches to the Guggenheim Museum in Venice and considerations of art. There’s a constant sense of the aftermath of illness and the poems never shy from physical and emotional vulnerability. Brave in its honesty and directness, Chic to be Sad confirms a special gift and presence in Irish poetry before reaching its wise conclusion:
‘There is so much to know, / so much I want you to hear.'

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher The Lit Young Writers Festival Waterford