Our Authors
Kate O’Neill
Harp in Hand is a soul-song—a luminous journey through memory, ancestry, and the unseen threads that bind spirit to place. Moving between worlds, it traces a passage from loss to remembrance, where the land of Ireland becomes both teacher and witness.
Along the coasts of Connemara and the ancient streets of Galway, the veil thins. Wells whisper. Trees hold memory. The Otherworld breathes just beneath the surface, alive in wind, water, and stone. Here, the past is not gone—it is listening. Ancestors gather not as shadows, but as presence: felt in the body, carried in the breath, calling the living back into relationship.
This is a story of return—not only across oceans, but inward, toward essence. The great crossing to America becomes part of a wider spiritual migration, where identity fractures and reforms, and where longing itself becomes a guide. Through grief, exile, and endurance, something sacred persists: a quiet knowing that cannot be erased.
Symbols rise like offerings—Brigid’s flame, ancient passage tombs, the rhythm of the bodhrán, the trembling notes of the harp—each one a doorway into deeper remembering. The ordinary lives of those who came before, though unrecorded, are honored as holy. Their breath continues in ours. Their lives, a prayer still unfolding.
Harp in Hand is an invocation of belonging beyond time. It is about listening—to the land, to the ancestors, to the soul’s own music—and discovering that home is not a place we find, but a presence we awaken to.
In this, her debut collection, Kate O’Neill celebrates and interrogates her Irish heritage. The landscape vibrates through overlays of religion, struggle, and the ongoing will to be wholly and unabashedly Irish. Her command of poetic form and tone is perfectly attuned to do justice to the intricacies of language, myth, history and ancestry. Each poem is a perfectly formed offering to grief, to beauty, to grit, to a past that is not just past—only waiting for those who are willing to look and listen.
—Michael Farry, author of An Apology for Our Survival and Troubles
“Where have you wandered? Why so long away?” bid the crows and ancestorial portraits in Harp in Hand, Kate O’Neill’s first full-length poetry collection. This epic pilgrimage haunts through memory, lore, and dialect—the beckoning and scarred landscape of Ireland’s kin, wars, poverty, curses, saints—an organ of skin that “lies too deep to be seen,” yet O’Neill traverses her lush heartland and discovers through her ancients “grief and guts,” “pluck of survival,” and “Celtic knots.” These poems, both mysterious and intimate, brim with love, music, voice, and the resilience of her people, and—as pilgrim, her own rebirth—the “…handing over an umbilicus/with dignity as she hands across lineage.” The sheer humanity will illuminate you.
—Catherine Strisik, Taos Poet Laureate and author of Goat, Goddess, Moon and The Mistress
Harp in Hand is a beautiful and deeply felt collection, a work of great insight and resonance. In these pages, Kate carries the heart of Connemara in every line—a “flickering pulse,/the oldest grief you will ever sing.” Her poems trace the ancestral path from the Maam Valley to the far shores of America, stitching memory and migration into one continuous breath. Between landscapes of stone and mist, she listens for the “crow pair [that] bears keen witness—” and in their echo, the reader hears the voices of those who crossed before her. Here, she honors Gaeilge, the Irish language, as a living inheritance, interwoven with the land itself. This collection offers us an invitation and a testament to kin, to place and, most of all, to belonging.
—Eileen Ní Shuilleabháin, author of Deepening the Senses, Depth psychology, Irish mythology, folklore, and Gaelic wisdom
Rooted in mystery, ritual, and myth, Harp in Hand rises from bog and blood, from ancient wellsprings of resonance. I love this manuscript. O’Neill’s Ireland reveals itself as a place where exile’s “unknown future” alchemizes to “pulse on past the horizon.” These poems beguile with “a garden of harp tones, honed peat/smoke, a bit of weather chained to some knowing/like a bad knee.” In this fine collection, “nothing is in vain—/everything is remembered,” and we have at long last stopped “following/the wrong gods/home.”
—Chip Livingston, author of Saints of the Republic and Crow-Blue, Crow-Black
Kate O’Neill has served as an educator for more than three decades, including as Chancellor of the University of New Mexico-Taos and as the New Mexico Secretary of Higher Education. She holds graduate degrees in education from Harvard University and completed an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Loch Raven Review, Taos Journal of Poetry, Skylight 47, and in numerous anthologies. Her chapbook, Emulsifying Fires: Ansel Adams in New Mexico (2022), was handprinted as a limited edition on a 1909 cast iron Chandler and Price letterpress and is now out of print.
Kate’s first encounter with Ireland ignited a sense of passion for peat smoke, Irish lilts, and mossy gnarled oaks. The visage of the land, its ghosts and grace, have kept her coming back for the better part of 50 years.
Her returns make for transformative pilgrimages—infused with the powerful pull of her ancestors and imbued with a love of music, poetry, history, resistance, grit, humor, beauty, resilience, grace, and imminence. Ireland’s indigenous ways, stories and myths feel close at hand. Each journey to Ireland envelopes her with a deeper sense of belonging, especially in the areas of her ancestors.
Kate holds dual United States-Irish citizenship and splits her time between Galway and Northern New Mexico where she lives with her family and beloved hounds.
