James Byrne is a poet, editor and translator. His most recent poetry collections are Places You Leave (Arc Publications, 2022), The Caprices (Arc Publications, 2019), Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, 2015) and White Coins (Arc Publications, 2015). Other publications include Blood/Sugar (Arc, 2009), WITHDRAWALS, Soapboxes (both KFS, 2019 and 2014) and Myths of the Savage Tribe (a co-authored text with Sandeep Parmar, Oystercatcher, 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 currently lives near Liverpool where he is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University.
Byrne is renowned for his commitment to international poetries and poetics. He is the International Editor for Arc Publications and was editor of The Wolf, which he co-founded, from 2002-2017. In 2012, with ko ko thett, Byrne co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012). In 2017, with Robert Sheppard, he edited Atlantic Drift, a book of transatlantic poetry and poetics (Arc, EHUP). In 2019, he co-edited, with Shehzar Doja, I am a Rohingya, the first anthology of Rohingya poetry in English. Byrne's poems have been translated into several languages and his Selected Poems (Poemas Escogidos) was published in Spanish in 2019 by Buenos Aires Poetry (translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez).
John Kinsella has written that 'James Byrne is a phenomenon and Blood/Sugar is astonishing...He is a complete original.' Ishion Hutchinson wrote of White Coins: 'this is language charged with a tough, sensual contraflow music, vividly alive to inquiry and witness [...] an astonishing work, one where virtù and gravitas are in concord with a hermetic passion, one fiercely and beautifully saying the unsayable.'
