Scottish Writers' Centre In Process Masterclass with Chris Agee

Chris Agee was born in 1956 in San Francisco and grew up in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. He attended Harvard University, where he studied with the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald. Since 1979 he has lived in Ireland. He is the author of two books of poems, In the New Hampshire Woods (The Dedalus Press, 1992) and First Light (The Dedalus Press, 2003). A former guest editor of Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry (Chicago) and Metre, he also edited Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia (Bloodaxe Books, 1998, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation) and Unfinished Ireland: Essays on Hubert Butler (Irish Pages, 2003).

His work is included in Magnetic North: The Emerging Poets (John Brown, Lagan Press, 2006), The Ulster Anthology (Patricia Craig, Blackstaff Press, 2006), The Blackbird’s Nest (Frank Ormsby, Blackstaff Press, 2006, in association with the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University), The Book of Irish American Poetry (Daniel Tobin, University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), Wingspan (Pat Boran, The Dedalus Press, 2006), and The Hip Flask: Short Poems from Ireland (Frank Ormsby, Blackstaff Press, 2000). His own anthology, The New North: Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland (Wake Forest University Press), commissioned by the National Endowment of the Arts in the United States, appeared in the autumn of 2008. He currently edits Irish Pages, a journal of contemporary writing based at The Linen Hall Library, Belfast. He reviews for The Irish Times and his collection of poems, Next to Nothing (Salt), appeared in Britain, Ireland and the United States in January 2009.