Gail McConnell is a writer from Belfast. She is the author of The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, September 2021), Fothermather (Ink Sweat & Tears, 2019), Fourteen (Green Bottle Press, 2018) and Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Palgrave, 2014). The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of materials related to the life and death of the author’s father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. Gail’s writing interests include violence, creatureliness, queerness and the possibilities and politics of language and form. Gail is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast.