Alice Lyons was born in Paterson, New Jersey and grew up in the United States. In 1998, she came to live in Cootehall, County Roscommon, where she still lives with her family. Her work embraces poetry and visual art.
Her first collection of poems, speck, won the 2002 Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry (speck, Netherlea, Belfast, 2009). In 2004 she was awarded the inaugural Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. She has been supported by bursaries in literature from the Arts Council in 2003 and 2007. Earlier work received an award from the Academy of American Poets in 1981.
Lyons’s poems have appeared in The Irish Review, Stand, Tygodnik Powszecheny, Poetry Ireland Review, mermaid turbulence’s element, The Shop, Barrow Street, Tears in the Fence, and Dancing With Kitty Stobling (Lilliput Press, 2005).
She was directly commissioned for a year-long public art project, Staircase Poems, at The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim in 2005-06, Her poem/intervention at The Barracks on Cootehall, Viewfinder (2008), was part of AFTER, an artist-led public art response to the changed landscape as a result of Ireland’s economic boom.
Her paintings and drawings have been widely exhibited and are in the collections of the Office of Public Works and NUI Galway. Her film-poem, Erasures, won the award for best first film at the Sligo Short Film Festival, 2005. The Polish Language, a film-poem made in collaboration with Orla Mc Hardy, was funded by a 2008 Frameworks Animation award from The Irish Film Board, RTÉ and The Arts Council.
She studied European History at Connecticut College (B.A. 1982), Sociolinguistics at the University of Pennsylvania (M.S. 1988) and Painting at Boston University (M.F.A. 1994). She has lectured in Art & Design at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology and at Maine College of Art in Portland. In 2009, she was Assistant Commissioner for Ireland at the Venice Biennale.