Writer and Curator

Morgan L. Ventura

Morgan L. Ventura (they/she) is a writer, poet, translator, and former archaeologist of Sicilian, Irish, Croatian, and Egyptian descent. Their poetry and prose appear in literary magazines and anthologies across Ireland, the UK, the US, and Canada, such as Banshee, Poetry Ireland Review, Best Canadian Essays, Al Jazeera, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
In 2023, she was shortlisted for Ireland's Listowel Writers' Week Poetry Collection Award and selected for The Stinging Fly Summer School in Nonfiction. In 2022, she attended the speculative fiction workshop residency with Sheree Renée Thomas at Under the Volcano. Alongside workshops and residencies, she has been invited to speak at festivals across Ireland about speculative fiction and the politics of archaeology, including the West Cork Literary Festival, NI Science Fest, and the Ranelagh Arts Fest (with Blindboy and Pauline McLynn).
Ventura's work has received support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, The Fulbright Foundation, and Poetry Day Ireland, among others, and they hold both a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and an MA in Poetry from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University Belfast. Originally from the American Midwest, they split their time between Canada, Ireland, and Mexico.