Jonathan C. Creasy (PhD) is a writer, filmmaker, musician, broadcaster, publisher, and educator, based in Dublin, Ireland. He is the recipient of a 2022 Residency in the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, a 2022 Creative Grant from the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University, a 2021 Literature Bursary and a 2022 Film Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland. He teaches on the Creative Writing faculty in University College Dublin.
Creasy is Co-Founder and Director of Dreamsong Productions, an independent Irish film and television company. He is Director and Producer of the feature documentary film, The Blue Shroud (2021), which has screened in festivals in Europe and the United States. He is currently at work writing, directing and producing a feature documentary film, Refusing to Forget: Life and Death on the Border.
Creasy has recently been commissioned by the Contemporary Music Centre (Ireland) and the Centre Culturel Irlandais (Paris) to direct a film as part of the Ulysses Journey 2022 project, marking the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s novel.
The resulting film, Luteofulvous ebullition: The Qualities of Water (2022), features new music by composer Garth Knox and performances by actor Barry McGovern and accordionist Dermot Dunne. The film premiered in the Irish Film Institute (Ireland’s national cinema) in February 2022, followed by an international tour.
Creasy is internationally recognised as a poet and author. His writing has appeared in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, The Paris Review, The Stinging Fly, Los Angeles Review of Books, Asheville Poetry Review, the anthology, Writing Home: The New Irish Poets (Dedalus Press), and many other publications. He edited and introduced the bestselling anthology, Black Mountain Poems, for New Directions (NYC).
“The power of anthologies lies not only in the individual works themselves but in the relationships between them. To anthologize is to confront, and perhaps even subvert, the myth of the solitary writer. In Black Mountain Poems, editor Jonathan C. Creasy strongly engages in this type of rebellion. He is true to the nature of his subject: Black Mountain College radically pushed against glorified individualism and nourished a notion of art based on community. It is a sense of “scriptural communion,” as Creasy calls it, that anchors this collection of 16 poets.” - Victoria Nebolsin, Hyperallergic
Creasy was raised in Los Angeles, where his father taught in the English department at UCLA. He studied music with jazz legends Peter Erskine and Jeff Hamilton. He went on to study music at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) under Charlie Haden and record at Geffen / Interscope Records and Capitol Studios in Hollywood.
Creasy moved to Ireland to study English Literature at Trinity College Dublin, where he was Poetry Editor of Icarus magazine. Graduating with First Class Honours, he took up a job as Writing Consultant in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, University of Texas at Austin. Following his time in Texas, Creasy returned to Dublin for PhD research in the School of English at TCD. In 2012, he founded New Dublin Press with Eimear Fallon. In 2015, he was a DAAD Scholar at Freie Universität Berlin, Universität der Künste Berlin (University of the Arts Berlin), and the Bauhaus Archive. His research has been funded by Trinity College Dublin, University of Connecticut, University of North Carolina, the German Government, the Irish Government, and the Royal Irish Academy.
Performance/ Workshop / Lecture, Universität der Künste Berlin (2019)
Creasy’s book of poems and essays, The Black Mountain Letters, is published by Dalkey Archive Press. He was awarded a 2016 Lannan Writing Residency by the Lannan Foundation. Creasy is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books and many other publications. Imagines, a project conceived by Creasy and published by his New Dublin Press, contains scores, poems, and prose by composer Benjamin Dwyer, poet Kimberly Campanello, and violist Garth Knox. Creasy is a co-author and editor of the book, with design by Rossi McAuley and his Distinctive Repetition studio. Imagines won a prestigious SILVER ICAD award for best Irish design in 2016.
Creasy continues to write and perform music in large venues throughout Ireland. His current musical collaborators include Benjamin Dwyer, Martin Nevin, and Brendan Jenkinson.
He works as a regular contributor to Arena and a reporter for The History Show on RTÉ Radio 1, Ireland's national broadcaster. Other radio credits include documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and the feature radio documentary, The Big Book: James Joyce’s Ulysses. Beside editing and publishing works for NDP, Creasy has served as Editor-in-Chief of Trinity’s peer-reviewed Journal of Postgraduate Research, poetry editor of Icarus magazine and Editor-in-Chief of Trinity’s College Green. He is founder and director of the Performing Poetry Project, and he has produced dozens of events including ‘An Evening with Susan Howe’, the 25th Ezra Pound International Conference (TCD), the Dylan Thomas Centenary and the Bloomsday Festival.
Creasy is also interested in border studies. He has reported on the U.S.-Mexico border for The Irish Times and other publications, and he is currently developing a series of films exploring borderlands around the world. Below are stills from recent reporting trips to the U.S.-Mexico border with Emmy-award-winning journalist Angela Kocherga.
As a teacher, Creasy lectures in English and Creative Writing in University College Dublin. He has also taught and delivered invited lectures and workshops in the University of Texas, Trinity College Dublin, Trinity's Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing, the James Joyce Cultural Centre, University of the Arts Berlin, Harvard University, and the Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
Creasy earned a PhD in English Literature from Trinity College Dublin.
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The Black Mountain Letters: Poems and Essays - Dalkey Archive Press (2016)