Terence Winch, originally from New York City, has lived in the Washington, DC, area since the early ’70s. He was one of DC’s “Mass Transit” poets, who were closely associated with the New York writers connected with the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in lower Manhattan.
Winch, the son of Irish immigrants, has also been part of Irish-American cultural life, both as musician and writer. Some of his poetry and other writing takes its subject matter from his upbringing in a Bronx immigrant neighborhood.
“We get this world from no other writer—this last glimpse of the culture of twentieth-century Irish immigrants in America as their first-generation American-born children witnessed it. …The totality of his work makes for so compelling an Irish mural as to merit George O’Brien’s judgment that Winch is ‘the voice of Irish America.’ There is in that voice traces of the tenacious love of life that…characterized Irish life prior to the famine—the elan that the world hears at the heart of Irish music.” — Jack Morgan , New World Irish (Macmillan, 2011)
Terence Winch’s 10th book of poems is It Is As If Desire (Hanging Loose Press, 2024). In 2023, the Pitt Poetry Series published That Ship Has Sailed. Seeing-Eye Boy, a YA novel that takes place in the Irish immigrant world of mid 20th-century New York, came out in 2020. Other recent poetry collections are The Known Universe (Hanging Loose, 2018) and This Way Out (Hanging Loose, 2014). In 2013, Salmon Poetry, based in county Clare, Ireland, published Lit from Below, a collection of 10-line poems. His 2011 collection, Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor, includes some of Winch’s best-known poems from earlier chapbooks, while Boy Drinkers (2007) is a series of mostly narrative poems that center around religion and Winch’s New York brand of Irish-Catholicism. The Great Indoors, winner of the Columbia Book Award, was published in 1995, and Irish Musicians/American Friends, winner of the American Book Award, was published by Coffee House Press in 1985. The Drift of Things was published by The Figures in 2000.
Contenders, a short story collection, was named a “best book” by Washingtonian magazine; That Special Place: New World Irish Stories is a collection of non-fiction stories that come primarily out of Winch’s experiences playing traditional Irish music with Celtic Thunder, the band he started with his brother Jesse in 1977. Many of the songs he wrote for Celtic Thunder recount the story of New York’s Irish community: with “When New York Was Irish,” “Saints (Hard New York Days),” “The Irish Riviera,” and “Childhood Ground” the best-known of them. Celtic Thunder’s second album, The Light of Other Days, won the prestigious INDIE award for Best Celtic Album in 1988, and in 1992 Irish America magazine named Winch one of “The Top 100 Irish Americans.”
Terence Winch’s most recent music albums are Celtic Thunder Live in Concert (2023), The Irish Riviera: The Winch Family Band (2023), and This Day Too: Music from Irish America (2017). An earlier CD that collects his best-known Irish compositions from his days with the original Celtic Thunder on one disk is When New York Was Irish: Songs & Tunes by Terence Winch (2007).
And, of course, the three albums by the original and authentic Celtic Thunder are still available online.
Winch’s work is included in more than 50 anthologies, including The Oxford Book of American Poetry, six Best American Poetry collections, and Poetry 180.
His work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Pleiades, The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Conduit, Shiny, Verse, Western Humanities Review, Agni, The World, Hanging Loose, New Hibernia Review, The New York Quarterly, et al.
Winch’s poems have also appeared in numerous online journals, including The Cortland Review, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Beltway Quarterly, Glimpse, The Café Review, and Poetry Daily, and have been featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and many times on “The Writer’s Almanac” radio program. He has interviewed many leading Irish writers for the cable TV series “The Writing Life,” and was himself the subject of an interview with Roland Flint for the series in 1998. (For the entry on TW by the late James Liddy, see The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, published by the University of Notre Dame Press.)
Terence Winch, a regular contributor to the Best American Poetry blog since 2008, has edited BAP’s “Pick of the Week” feature since 2020. TW has also written for The Washington Post, The Washingtonian, The Village Voice, The Wilson Quarterly, The Dictionary of Irish Literature, The Oxford Companion to American Poetry, and other books and publications.
In addition to an American Book Award and the Columbia Book Award, Terence Winch has also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry, as well as grants from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Fund for Poetry. He is also the winner of a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. In May of 2014, he was graduate commencement speaker at Madison Square Garden for his alma mater, Iona College, at which event he was awarded an honorary doctorate.
Terence Winch worked for the Smithsonian Institution for 24 years, for most of that time as Head of Publications at the National Museum of the American Indian. He also worked as senior editor and acting Chief of Publications at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. During his time at the Smithsonian, he produced more than 60 books and catalogues and five sound recordings of music and spoken arts. In the mid 1970s, he was artist-in-residence at the Corcoran College of Art, and the Corcoran’s first writing teacher. During the 2009 academic year, he was poet-in-residence for the Howard County (Maryland) high schools. From 2009-12, Winch was a Councilor with the Maryland State Arts Council, by appointment of Gov. Martin O’Malley. At the end of 2016, Terence Winch’s literary/music archive was acquired by Boston College.
“Reading Terence Winch’s work, I’m reminded not only that he is a poet I’ve imitated and consciously tried to learn from, since I first read his poems some 25 years ago, but also that he is one of my favorite contemporary poets. No one is as cleverly topical, as contemporary in his voice, no one is as fresh in his language and observations, no one is funnier.” —Roland Flint, 1998.