John FitzGerald started to write poetry in 2012 while in his late forties. He attended a number of poetry workshops at the time, led by poets Gerard Dawe, Jane Hirshfield, Thomas McCarthy, and Matthew Sweeney, and credits these as guiding him in his early practice. While still unpublished, he won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Prize for 2014. Soon after, his first appearance in print came in the New Irish Writing Page of the Irish Times, edited by Ciaran Carty, for which he was shortlisted for a 2015 Hennessy New Irish Writing Award in the Emerging Poetry category. Since then, his poems have appeared widely in journals, newspapers, and anthologies. A pamphlet, First Cut was published in 2017 by Southword Editions, in their New Irish Voices Series. In 2019, he was invited by the Salvage Press, Dublin, to collaborate with the Irish artist Dorothy Cross on a limited-edition handmade book of his poems about the night called Darklight. His poem Valley Bachelors was selected by the Government of Ireland to feature in the London Underground for St Patrick’s Day 2018. His first full-length collection, entitled The Time Being, was published in June 2021 by The Gallery Press, marking his formal debut to Irish and international poetry. John has worked since 1995 as the University Librarian at University College Cork, where he also studied English as an undergraduate in the late seventies and early eighties under the influence of poet-professors John Montague and Sean Lucey. He has lived at various times in Dublin, London, and Florence. He lives with his family on a farm in County Cork.