Tom Walsh

Tom Walsh recently retired after a 50-year career of working as a journalist for newspapers and magazines in Chicago, Dallas, New York, Iowa, Maine and Washington, D.C. For decades, his intense interest in Irish-American history inspired his research and writing about Ireland and the famine-driven diaspora that brought millions of Irish to America, Canada, Australia and beyond. His writings about Ireland have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The Des Moines Register, The Irish Times and The Cork Examiner.

Tom Walsh received a bachelor’s degree in journalism, with honors, from the University of Iowa, where he was a student in an Iowa Writer’s Workshop’s undergraduate program that included a course in fiction writing. Thirty years later, in 2002, he was awarded a master’s degree in fine arts from Dublin City University in Ireland, where he spent a term as a visiting lecturer, teaching news writing to both undergraduate and master’s level students.

His fascination with the “Erin’s Hope” expedition was a matter of serendipity. While researching the famine, he came across an almost parenthetical reference to an 1867 one-ship expedition to Ireland involving a tall ship, its cargo including experienced U.S. Civil War veterans of the Irish Brigades and thousands of weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition. The goal was to assist a rebellion that, by the time “Erin’s Hope” arrived in Ireland, had been long put down. It was, he felt then as now, a story that needed to be told. After five research trips to Ireland, including a 21-day North Atlantic crossing on a tall ship, the story has been told.

Tom Walsh lives with his wife Beth in a seaside home on the North Atlantic coastline in Gouldsboro, Maine, 80 miles south of the U.S. border with the Canadian province of New Brunswick. His interests beyond writing include photography and cooking.