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One of you asked me to share the biographical sketch I am using for the upcoming Irish trip. It references my father and family more than I would in a normal bio (like a hundred per cent more), but this particular event is connected to his legacy, so I am unofficially representing him, as well as my own work. Some of it is derived from earlier musings here about my own cultural and artistic identity.

Kyran Pittman was born in 1969, into a Newfoundland family notable for its artistic and literary contributions to the island culture. Her grandmother, Mary Pittman, published poems and stories under the pseudonym Len Margaret. Her father, Al Pittman, was a poet, playwright and author of short fiction and children's books. At the time of Kyran's birth, Al and his contemporaries--children when the Dominion of Newfoundland became a province of Canada in 1949 --were coming of age; asserting their cultural identity in a movement that became known as Newfoundland's creative "rennaissance." Kyran was raised in Corner Brook, on the west coast of the island, in a home that was frequented by musicians, poets, academics, visual artists and actors.

Today Kyran is a poet and essayist, living in the American south since 1996. She describes herself as a Newfoundlander with a Canadian passport and an American green card, but belonging to no country. Her writing draws deeply from the perspective of the outsider. Her poems and essays are dispatches from life's limbic places: the emotional, cultural and geographic borderlands where she ranges.

Kyran's work has appeared in TickleAce, New Century North American Poets, and the Toronto Globe and Mail. She performed throughout Ireland in 2003 for the launch of However Blow the Winds and is very happy to return to help launch __________, the anthology in honor of the March Hare literary festival which her father founded.