Who is poetry collective Femina Culpa?

Drawing on the expertise and interests of their protagonists, the collective explores how poetry can illuminate the continuing effect of history on life today.

In August 2025, Femina Culpa made their debut appearance at the Southbank Centre within the National Poetry Library’s Special Edition series, connecting poetry with historical research into female working-class voices. Ahead of which, here’s an introduction into the collective.

Femina Culpa is made up of three poets

In human form Femina Culpa collective are the poetic trio of Linda McKenna, Emma McKervey and Milena Williamson. Originally from Dublin and now based in Downpatrick, McKenna has worked in heritage and museums for nearly 30 years. In 2018 she won the Seamus Heaney Award for new writing, and her debut poetry collection, In the Museum of Misremembered Things, saw her win the 2020 An Post/Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year for its title poem. Her second collection is titled Four Thousand Keys.

A graduate of Darlington College of Arts from Holywood, County Down, McKervey has worked for two decades as an arts facilitator. Her poetry has been published in both the UK and Ireland, including her debut collection The Rag Tree Speaks, and her second collection, Highland Boundary Fault.

Williamson is an American poet living, writing and studying in Belfast, where she has earned a PhD in poetry from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University. A recipient of the Eric Gregory Award, she is the author of the pamphlet Charm for Catching a Train and her debut poetry collection Into the Night that Flies So Fast, which was published last year.

The group came together as recently as 2024

It was that 2024 publication date of Williamson’s debut collection that brought her into contact with McKenna and McKervey, each of whom saw their second collections published in the same year. McKenna and McKervey first came together at a poetry reading, finding a connection not only in their publication dates, but also in a shared interest in history and archives. And two became three when McKervey then met Williamson through the Irish Writers Centre’s 2024/2025 Evolution Programme; the pair started talking and were excited to find significant parallels between their new collections.

But they’ve a basis in a much deeper history

The collective may be young (the poets too!), but the poetry at its base is rooted much deeper in history. Reflecting their shared interests in archives, history and personal stories, each of McKenna, McKervey and Williamson’s 2024 collections drawn from historical research into the 1800s and the lives of working class women. 

Drawing on her archival expertise, McKenna’s Four Thousand Keys is inspired by the case of Elizabeth Dunham who was put on trial at the Old Bailey for stealing keys from the Bank of England,  and eventually sent to Bedlam. A search of Dunham’s lodgings uncovered four thousand keys for many public buildings around London including the House of Commons, the Greenwich Watch Tower, the Guildhall, Maidstone Gaol.

In Highland Boundary Fault, McKervey investigates the story of her great-grandparents whose love letters between Greenock and the Outer Hebrides were intercepted by a jealous village girl, resulting in a Sheriff’s Court Case in Stornoway. It was this case that ultimately helped establish a postal service in the Outer Hebrides.

And Williamson’s Into the Night that Flies So Fast explores the case of Bridget Cleary, who was murdered by her family and community members on suspicion of being a fairy changeling. Bridget lived in County Tipperary and is sometimes known as the last witch burned in Ireland although the narrative and beliefs surrounding her are more closely aligned with the changeling.

At their base is a want to project women’s voices and stories

Through their work the members of Femina Culpa show how women’s voices, although often less reported than men’s, do have a presence in historical archives and contribute greatly to our understanding of past and contemporary culture. As the collective explains, ‘poets are in a unique position to inhabit the ‘gaps’ in the historical record and provide imaginative responses to them’. The poems created by Femina Culpa draw past and present together within such imaginative responses, transforming the language of much of the formal reporting of history into powerful poetic imagery.

As too is a sense of togetherness

Also at the core of what Femina Culpa do, is a sense of bringing poets and readers together. Being a poet is a very solitary profession, and so they wanted to form a community around shared events, where each poet can support the others, rather than each poet reading their work in isolation. Question and answer sessions form a key part of their events, allowing people to engage with the poets, their books, and the historical material more deeply, and possibly even inspiring them to go on to write their own poems, or family or local histories.

Up until now you’d have had to cross the Irish Sea to see them

In their relatively short existence Femina Culpa’s events thus far have been restricted to the island of Ireland. These include reading at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast for International Women’s Day and connecting with local poetry communities such as the Poetry Lounge in Waterford. And, committed to connecting through poetry beyond the cities, they’ve read in community centres and museums in Killyleagh, Rathfriland and Carrickfergus amongst others.

That was until the summer of 2025 when, with the support of Culture Ireland, they travelled for the first time as a collective to this side of the water, for a short London tour that included their appearance here at the National Poetry Library.