Please join us on November 10, 2022, at 5pm at the Richard & Nancy Donahue Academic Arts Centre at MCC, 240 Central Street in Lowell, for the presentation of the  first Patrick J. Mogan Learning City award to William Samaras, former Lowell Mayor, City Council member and educator.

This celebration will also recognize winners of the recent writing competition, Atlantic Currents II, a collaboration between the learning cities of Lowell and Cork. In 2019 Lowell City of Learning completed a project whose objective was to create connections between two communities (the cities of Lowell, Massachusetts, US and Cork, Ireland) committed to the values and goals of the Learning Cities program of UNESCO. Writers associated with Cork and Lowell were asked to contribute fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, criticism, experimental and mash-up forms on any subject, bearing in mind community standards for humane expression. We had many excellent submissions that resulted in the inclusion of a wide range of writing and poetry by some 40+ authors in an anthology, Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell, published in April 2020 by Loom Press of Lowell, Massachusetts.

To continue to promote and support creative and experiential writing, we created a similar anthology containing work written by students and any alumni of the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML) and University College Cork (UCC). The submissions were reviewed and judged by writers from Lowell and Cork. Our judges in the US and Ireland selected 18 prizewinners from some 90+ submissions. Prizewinners were grouped into alumni and current students at the two universities. That several first, second, and third prizes were tied speaks to the quality of the submissions. In addition to these prizes and the recognition of our winners, their work is published in Atlantic Currents II Connecting Cork and Lowell.

This writing contest would not have been possible without a generous grant from Independent University Alumni Association of the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the financial support of the President’s Office of University College Cork, Ireland.