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Greg Delanty is an Irish poet. He is artist-in-residence at Saint Michael's College, where many of his current and past students have noted his alluring and prominent Irish accent, and current President of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.
Greg Delanty attended University College Cork where he was taught by Sean Lucy and John Montague and was among a talented group of writers who emerged at the university in that period, including Maurice Riordan, Gregory O'Donoghue, Thomas McCarthy, William Wall, Gerry Murphy, Sean Dunne. At UCC Delanty edited the magazine Quarryman and published his first poems there and in The Cork Examiner.
His third collection dealt largely with the theme of emigration. It took its title from the Irish custom of hosting a gathering, both festive and mournful, on the eve of departing for America. Delanty is the son of a printer, and his fourth collection, The Hellbox, is based on the printing idiom he learnt from his father. The Blind Stitch was set in Ireland, America and India.
Delanty was born in Cork, Ireland in 1958, and is generally placed in the Irish tradition. However, he now lives for most of the year in America, where he teaches at St Michael's College, Vermont. He became an American citizen in 1994, retaining his Irish citizenship. Irish novelist Colum McCann, who has himself resettled in America, has described Delanty as the poet laureate of the contemporary Irish-in-America: “Delanty has catalogued an entire generation and its relationship to exile. He is the laureate of those who have gone.â€
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