This series of narrative poems written in a flat, unadorned, matter-of-fact style recount Terence Winch's early days growing up immersed in Irish American culture and music.
Terence Winch, originally from New York City, now lives in the Washington, DC, area. In the early '70s, he was one of DC's "Mass Transit" poets and was closely associated with the New York writers connected with the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in lower Manhattan.
Winch, the son of Irish immigrants, has also been part of Irish-American cultural life, both as musician and writer. Some of his poetry and other writing takes its subject matter from his upbringing in a Bronx immigrant neighborhood.
His newest book of poems (Hanging Loose Press, May 2011) is called Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor. His previous title, called Boy Drinkers, is a series of mostly narrative poems that center around religion and Winch's New York brand of Irish-Catholicism. His collection of non-fiction stories, called That Special Place: New World Irish Stories, comes out of his experiences playing traditional Irish music with Celtic Thunder, a band he started with his brother Jesse in 1977. Many of the songs he wrote for Celtic Thunder recount the story of New York's Irish community: with "When New York Was Irish," "Saints (Hard New York Days)," and "The Irish Riviera" the best-known of them. Celtic Thunder's second album, The Light of Other Days, won the prestigious INDIE award for Best Celtic Album in 1988. Terence Winch's most recent music project is a CD that collects his best-known Irish compositions on one disk: When New York Was Irish: Songs & Tunes by Terence Winch.
Winch has published five books of poems and two story collections:
Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor
(Hanging Loose Press, 2011)
Boy Drinkers
(Hanging Loose Press, 2007)
Irish Musicians/American Friends
(Coffee House Press, 1985), an American Book Award winner
The Great Indoors
(Story Line Press, 1995), which won the Columbia Book Award
The Drift of Things
(The Figures, 2001).
In addition to the non-fiction stories in That Special Place
(Hanging Loose, 2004), Winch has also published a book of short stories called
Contenders (Story Line, 1989).
His work is included in more than 30 anthologies, including The Oxford Book of American Poetry and four Best American Poetry collections. His poems are also to be found in Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (Random House); The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present (Notre Dame); Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull); Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner's); Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website (Sourcebooks); and From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas (Thunder's Mouth).
His work has appeared in The Paris Review, New American Writing, The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Arshile, Shiny, Verse, Western Humanities Review, Agni, The World, Hanging Loose, Crab Orchard Review, New Hibernia Review, Irish Music et al.
Winch's poems have also appeared in such online journals as The Cortland Review, Poetry Daily, and The Innisfree Poetry Journal, and have been highlighted several times on "The Writer's Almanac" radio program. Featured in a profile on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," Winch was also the subject of a two-part interview on Public Radio International's "Dialogue" program. He has interviewed several leading Irish writers for the cable TV series The Writing Life, and was himself the subject of an interview with Roland Flint for the series in 1998. (For the entry on TW in The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, see www.nd.edu/~ndr/issues/ndr10/winch/winch.html).
TW has also written for The Washington Post, The Washingtonian, The Village Voice, The Wilson Quarterly, The Dictionary of Irish Literature, The Oxford Companion to American Poetry, and other books and publications. Since 2009 he has been a regular contributor to the Best American Poetry blog---see http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/terence_winch/
Terence Winch has received an NEA Fellowship in poetry, as well as grants from the DC Commission on the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Fund for Poetry. He is also the winner of a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing.
