Joan McBreen

Jesse Landeni, Salmon Poetry, enjoying their 45th birthday this year.

Ruth Carr, Deirdre Brennan, Mary Dorsey, Joan McBreen, and Joan edited the White Page anthology in the late 90s, which was the first anthology of women writers, you know, significant anthology of women writers based on, had they published in book form before, Alva Smith, Joan Newman, Nuala Ní Gónaill and Elaine Nicholl-Noyne.

And then the great pantheon of women, Margaret McCurtain, Yvonne Boland, Carol Rumans, Caroline Walsh and Edna O'Brien.

So it was great to just, you know, carve their names on a page while we were doing it as well.

And there's a good number of them.

And, you know, well, Mary O'Malley, Joan McBreen, Rita Ann Higgins, and, you know, Eva Burke.

That was my intention initially.

that women in the west of Ireland particularly just were not being represented at that time in the early 80s at all in poetry.