T. S. Kerrigan

BIOGRAPHY

T.S. (Thomas Sherman) Kerrigan, an American poet with dual Irish citizenship was born in Los Angeles in 1939, where he has continued to live, the second son of a postman. His paternal grandparents were from County Sligo in Ireland and a consciousness of the Irish culture has been prevalent in his poetry. The family had few books in the home as he was growing up, a fact recounted in his humorous poem "Secretly Reading my Mother's Magazine's in Childhood."

Kerrigan was educated in the public schools and at the University of California (where he first began to write poetry) and at the School of Law at Loyola University. Admitted to the California Bar in 1965, he was a trial and appellate lawyer in Los Angeles for 43 years until he resigned from the Bar in 2008. During many of those years he was listed in Marquis Who's Who in American Law. He served as President of the Irish American Bar Association in 1999. In 2001 He successfully defended a law enacted during the Great Depression to protect employees on public works projects in the United States Supreme Court, in Lujan v. G & G Fire Sprinklers, after that law had been stricken down on constitutional grounds in the lower federal courts.

The great bulk of his poetry, first published in important journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including Agenda, Acumen, Epos and The London Review, in England, and in The Southern Review, The International Poetry Review, First Things, The Formalist, The Raintown Review, and The New Formalist, in America, is collected in My Dark People (Central Avenue Press, 2008), and in the forthcoming A Homecoming in the Next Parish Over , due out from Central Avenue Press later this year and in two smaller earlier collections The Shadow Sonnets (2004) and Another Bloomsday at Molly Malone's Pub (1999). His Poetry has also been anthologized in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems (Penguin, 2006), and Literature and its Writers (Bedford/St. Martins, 2008).

During the 1970s he was editor of Hierophant, a journal of poetry. During 2008 he served as editor of The Raintown Review. The correspondence concerning these two projects is preserved in the library at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

In addition, he is the author of two plays produced in Los Angeles, Branches among the Stars (1990), based on James Joyce's Dublin years and A Thorn in the Heart. Later he was a theater critic and a member of the Los Angeles Drama Critic's Circle. Over the years he has written humorous articles for The American Reporter.

The father of six children, Kerrigan is presently married to the former Eilish McCallan.