John Menaghan, professor: A.B., Boston College; M.A., Syracuse University; Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley
Director: Irish Studies Program
Director: Summer in Ireland
John Menaghan teaches courses in Irish literature and culture, twentieth-century literature, the dramatic monologue, and creative writing.
Menaghan has published two books of poetry, both with Salmon Poetry (Ireland). Kirkus Reviews describes his first book, All the Money in the World (1999), as “an auspicious beginning” and the poems therein as “humorous, ironic, erotic, neurotic, and tender both by turns & often simultaneously . . . quite wonderful.” The Hudson Review calls his second book, She Alone (2006) "one of the best books of 2006," containing "fifty-odd lyrics, each in a different form, each handled with unobtrusive panache," "poetry with a human center," "smart and affecting," "utterly original," and "a book in which style and substance harmonize," & concludes by calling the poet himself "the real thing." And Midwest Book Review calls She Alone "a unique experience in epic poetry and enthusiastically recommended." His third volume of poetry is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in Fall 2009.
Winner of an Academy of American Poets prize and several other awards, he has given poetry readings in a variety of venues from London to Paris to Debrecen (Hungary) as well as around Ireland from Dublin to Donegal and across America from New York to Honolulu. His poems and translations have appeared in U.S. and Irish journals, including Atlanta Review, Poetry Ireland, The Cuirt Journal, Working Papers in Irish Studies, Occident, Berkeley Poetry Review, Revival, nthposition, Boston College Magazine, Song, California Quarterly, Salome, Syracuse Review, Syracuse Poems and Stories, Bloodroot, and Stylus.
Menaghan’s recent move into playwriting has seen his one-act play A Rumor of Rain performed at the Empty Stage Theater in Los Angeles (as part of an evening that included work by John Patrick Shanley and Neil Simon) and given staged readings at the ATHE theater conference in San Francisco, by the Women in Theatre group in Los Angeles, and as part of the New Works Festival at Loyola Marymount University. Two other one-acts, What? and Break of Day, have been given staged readings at Barnsdall Park in Hollywood, the latter directed by the author himself. Menaghan also directed a staged reading of a performance version of She Alone at LMU in February 2007, featuring eight off-campus actors. And both A Rumor of Rain & his latest short play To Put Away Childish Things? have been selected for upcoming staged readings as part of “Script Tease 2007” in San Diego.
Menaghan has published an article on Robert Browning in University of Toronto Quarterly and one on James Joyce and Samuel Beckett in Colby Quarterly, as well as a chapter on Maeve Brennan in Too Smart to be Sentimental, a volume of essays on Irish American Women Writers published by the University of Notre Dame Press. He has also presented scholarly papers at conferences across America as well as in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Sweden, and served as a reviewer for the University of California Press and Routledge.
Menaghan serves as Director of both the Irish Studies & Summer in Ireland programs and runs the annual LMU Irish Cultural Festival.