Atlantic Currents II: Connecting Cork & Lowell

Prize-winning prose and poetry by alumni and 

students of University College Cork in Ireland

and University of Massachusetts, Lowell, in the

U.S. This collection of stories, essays, and poems by emerging and established writers is

introduced by U.S. Ambassador to Ireland

Claire Cronin and the Republic of Ireland's 

Ambassador to the U.S. David Mulhall. Defined

broadly, the theme of the book is learning and education, both formal and informal as described by the authors. Both universities are critical to their home communities, and the selections showcase the talent on campus now and among the graduates of the schools. The writers investigate their respective locales and document memorable learning experiences in a wide array of situations, from sailing voyages to strife-torn countries and among the familiar people in their lives as well as characters imganied. 

John Wooding is professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he served as Provost for four years. On campus, he advanced interdisciplinary study and research on regional economic and social development. With Kristin G. Esterberg, he co-authored Divided Conversations: Identities, Leadership, and Change in Public Universities (Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), and with Charles Levenstein co-authored The Point of Production: Work Environment in Advanced Industrial Societies (The Guilford Press, 1999). A graduate of the London School of Economics and Brandeis University, John was born in Northampton, England, and now lives in New England.

Paul Marion (b. 1954) is the author of Union River: Poems and Sketches (2017) and editor of Jack Kerouac’s early writing, Atop an Underwood (1999). His book Mill Power (2014) documents the twentieth-century revival of the iconic factory city where he was born, Lowell, Massachusetts. With Tina Neylon and John Wooding, he edited Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell (2020), featuring writers from Ireland and America. His recent work has appeared in So It Goes, the journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library in Indiana; Café Review in Portland, Maine; PoetsReadingtheNews.org, a national online publication; SpoKe Seven, a Boston-based poetry annual; Résonance, a Franco-American journal at UMaine Orono; and Merrimack Valley Magazine. With his wife, Rosemary Noon, he lives on a high hill in Amesbury, Mass., in sight of the seacoast and uplands of New Hampshire and Maine.