Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell brings together sixty-five writers from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean whose stories, poems, essays, songs, and parts of novels come to us in familiar voices. While we recognize the sound and sense in these works because of the well-traveled routes between Ireland and America, there is much to discover in today’s writing from both places. Complex relationships, sublime joy in small and large matters, destabilizing external forces, the hunger for harmony, snares of history, transcendent moments in special locations, the simple attempt to get through “it all” every day—all this and more the reader will find.

Spurred by a desire to make a strong bond between two historic cities whose modern resurgence has been driven in large part by commitments to lifelong, experiential, community-based learning and teaching. The organizers of Cork Learning City and Lowell: City of Learning found each other two years ago and set about collaborating in the spirit of UNESCO’s Learning Cities global network. With this anthology, the connecting thread is made stronger through the now entwined writing and reading in both places.