Bremen → Hamburg / James Byrne

YOU CAN READ THE POEM HERE

James Byrne is a poet, editor, translator and visual artist. His most recent poetry collections are The Caprices, a response to Francisco Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’ (Arc, 2019), Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, US, 2015) and White Coins (Arc Publications, UK, 2015). He was the editor of The Wolf, an influential, internationally-minded literary magazine between 2002 and 2017. In 2012 he 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 he co-edited I am a Rohingya, the first book of Rohingya refugee poems in English. He is the co-editor of Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Edge Hill University Press/Arc, 2017) and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21^st Century, published by Bloodaxe in 2009. Byrne received a PhD from Edge Hill University and 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 and is currently Reader in Contemporary Literature at Edge Hill University. Byrne has given readings in Libya and Syria and his Selected Poems / Poemas Escogidos are published by Buenos Aires Poetry. He has translated poems by Myanmar and Rohingya poets, among others. He is the International Editor for Arc Publications and his poems have been translated into several languages including Arabic, Burmese and Chinese. Forrest Gander writes that reading Everything Broken Up Dances is ‘like gulping firewater shots of the world’. John Kinsella declares Byrne ‘a complete original’.