Paula Meehan was born and reared in the north inner city of Dublin. She was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and received an MFA degree from Eastern Washington University. She has published five collections of poetry and numerous stage and radio plays. She has been the recipient of many awards, among them the Butler Award for Poetry from the Irish American Cultural Institute, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature, and the Denis Devlin Memorial Award for her most recent collection of poems, Dharmakaya (Wake Forest University Press). She is a member of Aosdána, the Irish Academy for the Arts, and teaches in a project for stabilized drug users and in other community contexts. A fine-art edition of new work (with Theo Dorgan and Tony Curtis) is forthcoming from Brooding Heron Press (located on Waldron Island in the San Juan Islands of Washington State).