James Byrne

Poet, editor, and translator James Byrne was born in the UK. He is the author of the poetry collections Everything that is Broken Up Dances (Tupelo Press, 2015), White Coins (Arc, 2015), and Blood/Sugar (Arc, 2009). He earned an MFA in poetry from New York University, where he was awarded a Stein Fellowship. Byrne was the poet in residence at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, and is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University in England. He is the international editor for Arc Publications and the editor of The Wolf, which he cofounded in 2002.

Byrne’s poems have been translated into several languages—including Arabic, Burmese, and Chinese—and he has given poetry readings across the world. The poet John Kinsella wrote: “James Byrne is a phenomenon and Blood/Sugar is astonishing. Byrne has a razor-sharp wit, an acute intellect and a superb facility with language. The poetry he writes is both culturally and intellectually ‘learned’, but also rhetorically and lyrically confident. He is a complete original.” Forrest Gander wrote of Everything Broken Up Dances that it is “like gulping firewater shots of the world.”

Byrne cotranslated and coedited Bones Will Crow (Arc, 2012), the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English. He is the coeditor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, (Bloodaxe, 2009) and editor of The Wolf: A Decade (2012). He is currently coediting Atlantic Drift: an Anthology of Poetry & Poetics, featuring poets from the US, UK, and Canada.

Byrne lives near Liverpool, England.