T.S.Kerrigan

Photo by E. McCallan

T.S. Kerrigan was born in Los Angeles, CA, 100 years after the Big Wind of 1839. He is the youngest of two sons of a postman and a shoe saleswoman. His family has its origins in County Sligo, in the west of Ireland, where it claims to be descended from that Middleton family which helped give Ireland its greatest poet.

He was educated in the Public Schools of Los Angeles, a daydreamer of a boy who was often assumed to be of limited intelligence by his long suffering teachers, and at the University of California and Loyola University Law school. He is married to the former Eilish McCallan, a fellow dual citizen of Ireland and America, and is the father of six beautiful and gifted children.

A long time member of the California Bar and a veteran trial and appellate lawyer, he served on the Board of Directors of the Irish American Bar Association for a number of years and was elected its president in 1999. He is also a former theater critic affiliated with the Los Angeles Drama Critic's Circle, a playwright with two produced plays, and a former editor of the 70s poetry magazine Hierophant. He adopted the pen name T.S. Kerrigan early on to prevent his clients discovering his involvement in poetry and the theater, and drawing the inevitable negative inference that he was not therefore wholly dedicated to the legal profession.

His poetry has appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in numerous magazines, such as Acumen, Agenda, Envoi, the Southern Review, the Formalist, the New Formalist and the International Poetry Review. It has also been included in a number of anthologies including Garrison Keillor's Good Poems, and he has published two chapbooks: Another Bloomsday at Molly Malone's Pub and The Shadow Sonnets and Other Poems, which is reviewed in this issue and is available from Scienter Press.

A few years ago the library at the University of California at Santa Barbara reported that he had died towards the end of last century, and subsequently the Law School at the University of West Virginia went so far as to issue his obituary on the Internet. Nevertheless, he consistently denies his death and continues to write poetry, his first and primary interest.

In 2008, Central Avenue Press in N.M. will release My Dark People, the most complete collection of his work so far.