Seamus Cashman taught in Tanzania in the 1960s, and back in Dublin became an editor with Irish University Press. In 1974 he founded Wolfhound Press to publish works of fiction, anthologies of poetry, cultural & literary studies, photography, history, and also quality books for young readers. He also reissued many established Irish writers of the early 20th century, including in particular: Liam O’Flaherty, Margaret Barrington and Monk Gibbon. Cashman introduced the public to the famed Father Browne photographs, with works on Ireland, the Titanic, World War I and Australian images. His Wolfhound Press won many book and design awards and earned a reputation for its contribution to the flourishing of Ireland’s small press publishing through the 1970s to 2001. He received the Reading Association of Ireland’s Special Merit Award in 2005 as compiler and editor of the children’s anthology, Something beginning with P.
In addition to his poetry writing, Cashman also facilitated creative workshops with adults, teenagers and children, including in primary and secondary schools. At Zion NS, Rathgar, he collaborated with the Principal and fellow poet, Tom Conaty, to produce a children’s film (Stitched) based on workshops with the children who wrote the entire script, and who helped produce and perform it for the film. For 2020, 2021 and 2022, he compiled and edited the extraordinary Poetry Ireland annual ‘Poemathon’ of response lines from the public to opening first lines on current themes by President Michael D Higgins; John Sheehan of the Dubliners; and former president and member of The Elders, Mary Robinson.
Cashman has read his poetry in Ireland, England, Belgium, the USA, Palestine and Saudi Arabia. He was an English language judge for the International Mamilla Poetry Festival at Ramallah, and their first International Fellow at the Black Earth Institute, a writers and artists think-tank in Minnesota, where he also edited the Peaks & Valleys issue of their About Place Journal.
Born in Conna village in East Cork, in a room his mother named ‘Beggar’s Bush’, he has lived in Portmarnock, Malahide, and now Swords, in north Dublin since the 1970s. He has four adult children and a grandson, Conor, ‘whose presence affirms the poetry of life’.
Emma Byrne is a graphic designer and artist. She is a graduate of Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design. She has won numerous awards for her design including The IDI (Irish Design Institute) Graduate Designer of the Year, the IDI Promotional Literature Award for her work on Brown Morning, and a Children’s Books Ireland Bisto Merit Award for her work on Something Beginning With P: New Poems from Irish Poets. She has illustrated many books, including Best-Loved Oscar Wilde, Best Loved Yeats, The Most Beautiful Letter in the World by Karl O’Neill, a special edition of Ulysses by James Joyce, and A Terrible Beauty by Mairéad Ashe Fitzgerald. She lives in a thatched house in Co. Wexford.
