Featured Speakers:
Sean McKernan is an accomplished and internationally renowned photographer who has documented the social, cultural, and political life of Belfast over the past 45 years. In 1983. He co-founded the award-winning Belfast Exposed Community Photography Project, which he directed until 2001. His distinctive style of work that resonates with the communities he portrays has been extensively exhibited throughout Europe, America, and Australia, and is housed in many private collections both at home and abroad. As a highly respected social photographer, his work provides a powerful visual account of Belfast’s turbulent history and its fragile journey towards peace. His extensive collection of images explores the challenges and resilience of a divided society, capturing moments that reveal both conflict and hope. Now working as a freelance photographer with his Shoot Belfast Project, he continues to deliver socially engaging photography projects throughout Ireland. In 2024, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to photography at a special event in Belfast City Hall.
Molly Sturdevant was an associate professor of early modern philosophy for ten years before pivoting to a career in editing and writing. Her sense of place and economic realities are at the core of her prose and poetry, which have appeared in After Hours Press, Orion Magazine, The Dark Mountain Project, Crab Creek Review, Poetry Northwest, About Place Journal, and many other places. Nominated for a Best of the Net and a Pushcart, she is recognized as a Western Federation of Miners Union Scholar, and has served as a reader for Pithead ChaMichpel Magazine and The Maine Review. Her debut novel, The Sleepers, brings to life the true story of a 19th-century labor strike, researched in union archives (Regal House Publishing, September 2026). Her work has been supported by residences at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest and Elsewhere Studios. She grew up in Colorado, lives in the Midwest, and is working on a second novel.
Michael Patrick MacDonald is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, and the acclaimed Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion. He has won the American Book Award, a New England Literary Lights Award, and an Outstanding Book Award from the GustavusMyers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. Both of his books are frequent selections for campus reads.
After losing four siblings and seeing his generation decimated by poverty, crime, addiction, and incarceration, MacDonald became a leading Boston organizer, helping to launch many anti-violence initiatives, including gun-buyback programs and support networks for survivors. He continues to work with survivor families, educators, and organizers, using his trauma-informed, transformative storytelling curriculum, The Rest of the Story.
In 2019, he received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to teach at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is Professor of the Practice in Northeastern University’s Honors Program, teaching writing and social justice issues, and at Harvard Summer School, where he teaches the role of personal narrative in restorative and transformative justice. He is currently writing his third book of narrative nonfiction.
Joe Greaney, from County Mayo, Ireland, is a renowned bilingual storyteller and Social Historian. His family has a deep, personal connection to the most important movement in Irish History, i.e., the defeat, by peaceful means, of the ‘Landlord’ system that had been inflicted for 500 years on the peasant and tenant classes. Joe introduces us to the people involved, how the poor were mobilized, and the all-important role of the Church in his small village in the 1870s and 80s.
Living at the time in Joe’s house, the Parish Priest gave the term and the process ’to boycott’ to the world. This fascinating ‘story’ is his firsthand account of how it all unfolded!
