In the poems of The Offspring of the Moon, John W. Sexton speaks to a tradition deeply rooted in the Irish literary imagination: from the oral tales and myths of pre-Christian times, through the gothic horrors of Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, to the early science-fictional romances of Fitz-James O'Brien and M. P. Shiel. These are poems of the altered mind, the cosmic journey, the daemons and totems of the spirit world, the subversion of logic and science.
John W. Sexton was born in 1958 and is the author of five previous poetry collections: The Prince’s Brief Career, Foreword by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, (Cairn Mountain Press, 1995), Shadows Bloom / Scáthanna Faoi Bhláth, a book of haiku with translations into Irish by Gabriel Rosenstock (Doghouse, 2004), Vortex (Doghouse, 2005), Petit Mal (Revival Press 2009), and The Offspring of the Moon (Salmon Poetry 2013).
He also created and wrote The Ivory Tower for RTE radio, which ran to over one hundred half-hour episodes. His novels based on this series, The Johnny Coffin Diaries and Johnny Coffin School-Dazed are both published by The O’Brien Press and have been translated into Italian and Serbian.
He is a past nominee for The Hennessy Literary Award and his poem The Green Owl won the Listowel Poetry Prize 2007. In 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.