Winner of the 2nd Annual
Crossroads Irish-American Writing Contest
2011-2012

Kathleen Donohoe's short story, "You Were Forever," has been selected as the winning entry in the Crossroads Irish-American Festival's second annual contest.

Please click here to read the winning entry.

Kathleen Donohoe grew up in Brooklyn, NY, the daughter, niece and cousin of New York City firefighters. Her short fiction has appeared in several literary magazines, including The Recorder: Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, Harpur Palate, Web Conjunctions, the SNReview and NYU's Washington Square Review. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son, works full-time at the Brooklyn Botanic garden and is writing a novel.

The Crossroads Irish-American Festival is grateful for the support of the judges in this 2nd annual writing contest.  They have generously donated their time and expertise to selecting a winner among the many wonderful entries we received.

The 2011-2012 Writing Contest Judges

Catherine Brady is Academic Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of San Francisco. She is the winner of the Brenda Ueland Prose Prize and the Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Prize. She is also author of three short story collections: The End of the Class War (1999), finalist for the 2000 Western States Book Award, Curled in the Bed of Love (2003), winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and The Mechanics of Falling (2009), winner of the Northern California Book Award for Fiction; a biography: Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA (2007); and a book on the craft of short fiction, Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction (2010). Published in Other Voices, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Short Stories 2004.

To Purchase Catherine Brady's Books, please click on the following links:
Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction (Click here to buy it)

Curled in the Bed of Love (Click here to buy it)

Mechanics of Falling (Click here to buy it)


Jean McGarry is Professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of six books of fiction, among them the novel The Courage of Girls (Rutgers University Press) and the short story collection Dream Date (JHU Press). Her 2006 novel, A Bad and Stupid Girl (University of Michigan Press), received the University of Michigan Fiction Prize. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Boulevard, The Southwest Review, and others. She served as chairwoman of The Writing Seminars from 1997-2005.

To Purchase Jean McGarry's Books, please click on the following links:
Airs of Providence (Click here to buy it)

Home at Last (Click here to buy it)

Dream Date (Click here to buy it)

Ocean State (Click here to buy it)


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, called Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor, includes very recent work along with some of Winch's best-known poems from earlier chapbooks. His previous book, called Boy Drinkers, is a series of mostly narrative poems that center around religion and Winch's New York brand of Irish-Catholicism. That Special Place: New World Irish Stories is a collection of non-fiction stories that come 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, and in 1992 Irish America magazine named Winch one of "The Top 100 Irish Americans." 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.

To Purchase Terence Winch's books, please click on the following links:
Falling out of Bed in a Room with No Floor:
Boy Drinkers (Click here to buy it)

That Special Place: New World Irish Stories (Click here to buy it)

When New York was Irish: Songs and Tunes by Terence Winch
(Click here to buy it)

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