Kerrie O' Brien has been published in many journals and newspapers including Cyphers, The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, Banshee Lit, The Irish Examiner, Southword, Orbis and The Penny Dreadful.??In February 2012 she was the first poet to read as part of the New Writers Series in Shakespeare & Co., Paris. Her poem "Blossoms" was chosen as the winning entry in the Emerging Talent category of the 2011 iYeats Poetry Competition. Her flash fiction piece "That Night" won the RTE Arena Flash Fiction Competition 2012 and Culture Ireland sponsored her to read in Los Angeles in June of that year. She was one of the emerging writers chosen to read at the Cork Spring Poetry Festival 2013 as well as the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series, Listowel Writers' Week, Cuisle International Poetry Festival and at the London Irish Arts Centre. Her short fiction piece "Dole" features in the New Planet Cabaret Anthology published by New Island in association with RTE Arena. She was shortlisted for the Penny Dreadful Novella Prize 2015 and is currently working on her first novel. She has a BA in History of Art and Architecture from Trinity College Dublin. Illuminate is her debut collection of poetry and was made possible by a literature bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland.

Books by Kerrie O' Brien:

Other poems on the web by Kerrie O' Brien:
Four poems
"Moving"
"Blurring"

Kerrie O' Brien's Website.

Kerrie O' Brien on Facebook.

About Illuminate:

"Every poem in this collection has the grace of its occasion, speaks with an earned confidence, rehearses and proposes insights of quiet, lingering power. With economy, with precision, with inspired and exact gratitude for being alive, O' Brien draws from each poem here a crafted epiphany — of love and memory, of art and its occasions, of light and colour and time and being human."
—Theo Dorgan

"Kerrie O' Brien gifts us a pure poetry of the senses. Her world is rich with its startling and honest scrutiny of people and places, of states of mind and twilit in-betweens. The writing demonstrates a refreshing openness to language and feeling, and is as colourful as it is spare and understated. Her sense of the city is sublime, whether writing of Dublin or Paris, and her response to the iconic shapers of visual culture original. Through her eyes, the fragile world we inhabit is illuminated: raw, erotic, tender, but aflame with a poetically controlled feeling that ranges from lament to celebration. O' Brien's vision is beautiful and out of the ordinary, and this is one of the best collections I have read this year."
—Mary O'Donnell

"Kerrie O' Brien's poems communicate in a kind spontaneous language that is pared down to the essentials in a way that truthfully reflects and illuminates her felt emotions and what she sees as the impermanence of things. They reveal a poet of marked sensibility and delicate cadences."
—Gerard Smyth