A writer in several genres, Geraldine Mills is the author of six collections of poetry, three collections of short stories and two children’s novels for middle-grade readers. She has been awarded many prizes and bursaries including the Hennessy/Tribune Emerging Fiction Award and New Irish Writer Award, for her short story, ‘Lick of the Lizard’, three Arts Council Bursaries, a Covid Crisis Award and a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for her poetry collection, An Urgency of Stars (Arlen House, 2010). She collaborated with American poet, Lisa C. Taylor on the joint collection: The Other Side of Longing (Arlen House, 2011) which was chosen as the Gerson Reading at the University of Connecticut, 2011.

She has created new poetry with visual artists, Joan Hogan and Denise Hogan, on the exhibition ‘Triúr’ and with Galway director, choreographer and dancer on the dance-poetry performance ‘Between Language and Limb’. She has been awarded writing residencies in The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Cill Rialaig Arts Centre, The Heinrich Böll Cottage, Achill Island, Ireland and Fundación Valparaiso, in Spain.

Geraldine’s monologue ‘This is from the Woman who Does’ was premiered at the Provincetown Theatre Playwrights’ Festival, Cape Cod, Ma, USA in October 2004. There she met Jacqueline M. Loring, director of the Cape Cod Writers Center. At Jacqueline’s invitation, she returned to Cape Cod the following year to read at various venues and in 2008 to facilitate a week-long short story workshop at the Cape Cod Writers Conference.

Since then, Geraldine has travelled regularly to the US to give readings. As a result, she has developed special relationships with the University of Missouri, St Louis; University of Connecticut; Highline College, Washington State; Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia; and on the Emerson College Summer School in Co. Clare, Ireland.

Geraldine’s family connection with the US goes back to 1883 when her maternal great-grandparents and six children (one of them her grandmother) emigrated from the impoverished west of Ireland to Warren, Rhode Island as part of the Tuke Assisted Emigration Scheme. However, they didn’t settle and returned to Ireland less than two years later. This personal story informs her poetry collection Bone Road in Word and Image (Arlen House, 2020). She was awarded an Arts Council Agility Award to complete When the Light, her new and selected poems which was published by Arlen House in August 2023. She lives in Co. Galway on the west coast of Ireland.