James Byrne reads for Poets & Players at the Whitworth Gallery on 21 September 2019
Channel: Poets & Players
Date: 27/09/2019

James Byrne is a poet, editor and translator. His most recent poetry collections are The Caprices (2019), Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, 2015) and White Coins (Arc Publications, 2015). His other publications include Blood/Sugar (Arc, 2009), plus the pamphlets WITHDRAWALS (KFS, 2019), Soapboxes and Myths of the Savage Tribe (a co-authored text with Sandeep Parmar) both published in 2014.

Byrne received an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where he was given a Stein Fellowship (‘Extraordinary International Scholar’). He was the Poet in Residence at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He lives near Liverpool where he is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University.

He is the International Editor for Arc Publications and was editor of The Wolf, which he co-founded, from 2002-2017, publishing many international poets. In 2012, with ko ko thett, Byrne co-translated and co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012, Northern Illinois University Press, 2013) and, in 2019, he co-edited I am a Rohingya, the first anthology of Rohingya poetry in English. He is renowned for his commitment to international poetries and poetics. His poems have been translated into several languages including Arabic, Burmese and Chinese. His Selected Poems (Poemas Escogidos) is published in Spanish by Buenos Aires Poetry, translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. Byrne has given poetry readings across the world, at festivals in countries such as Libya, Myanmar, Syria, across Europe and the United States.

Of Everything Broken Up Dances the American poet and translator Forrest Gander has written that reading Byrne’s poetry is ‘like gulping firewater shots of the world’:  The poet John Kinsella wrote: ‘James Byrne is a phenomenon and Blood/Sugar is astonishing…He is a complete original.’