Chris Agee

Christopher Robert Agee is an American poet, essayist, editor and publisher living in Ireland.

He is the Founder and Editor of Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and of The Irish Pages Press/Cló An Mhíl Bhuí as well as the author of four books of poems, and one work of poetic non-fiction.

He lives in Belfast, and divides his time between Ireland, Scotland and Croatia.

Chris Agee was born in San Francisco on a US Navy hospital ship and grew up in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bronxville, New York and Block Island, Rhode Island.

His father was Robert Cecil Agee, a lawyer; and his mother Anne Marie Agee (née Stanford) was a legal secretary.

Agee has a younger sister, Elizabeth Macon Agee, who lives in Brooklyn with her two sons.

His paternal uncle is William Cameron Agee, a noted art historian of early twentieth-century American modernism; and his maternal uncle was Thomas Elmer Stanford, one of the most important ethno-musicologists of twentieth-century Mexico, where he lived and worked for over 60 years.

After high school at Phillips Academy Andover and a year in Aix-en-Provence, France (Institute pour des Étudiants Étrangers, Université D’Aix-en-Provence), he attended Harvard University (BA, cum laude, English and American Literature and Language) and since graduation has lived in Ireland.

At Harvard, he did both a versification course and his undergraduate degree thesis (on W.H. Auden) with the poet and classical translator Robert Fitzgerald, who had a considerable literary influence on him.

He was also highly influenced by a course taught by the Brazilian philosopher and social theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger, which included many related conversations.

During his year in France, his friends included Montague Don (now a BBC presenter) and Ernst Brunner (now a Swedish poet and novelist); and at Harvard, Mira Nair (now a film-maker) and Julie Agoos (now a poet).

Agee wrote his first poems in his last year at Harvard, but none of his work was published until the late 1980s in Irish periodicals.

His poems, reviews and articles have appeared regularly in The Irish Times since the early 1990s.

Following In the New Hampshire Woods (1992) and First Light (2003), his third collection of poems, Next to Nothing (2008), was shortlisted in Britain for the 2009 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry (funded by the British Poet Laureate), and its sequel, Blue Sandbar Moon, appeared in 2018, followed by a new work of “poetic non-fiction”, Trump Rant (2021).

In 1996, towards the end of the four-year siege of Sarajevo, he visited the devastated city to participate in the 12th Sarajevo Winter Festival.

The festival invitation was due to his writings on the Bosnian war.

During his week there, he met many leading Bosnian writers and artists, and witnessed the liberation of the city as the ultra-nationalist Serbian forces withdrew from the surrounding hills from which they besieged the city for nearly four years.

Later in 1996, “A Week in Sarajevo” was published in Ireland and soon translated in Sarajevo.

Several of his Irish essays – “Weather Report: Good Friday Week, 1998”, “Poteen in a Brandy-cask: The Ethical Imagination of Hubert Butler” (1998), “Heaney's Blackbird” (2007), “The New North” (2008), “The Ethnic Basis of Irish Poetry” (2010), “Troubled Belfast” (2017), “Parable of a Summer” (2018), “The Vote Was Cant” (2019) and “Sundial & Hourglass” (2021), mostly published in Irish Pages, The Yale Review or The Irish Times – are also well known in Ireland and Britain.

Agee edited Scar on the Stone (Bloodaxe Books, 1998, Poetry Society Recommended Translation), the first English-language anthology of Bosnian literature published after the outbreak of the Bosnian war and the subsequent genocide and partition.

It was compiled with the assistance of the Bosnian poets Vojka Djkić and Marko Vesović.

Scar on the Stone was funded by The Soros Foundation and brings together 19 of Bosnia's most distinguished poets, both pre-war and wartime, from the country's three main ethnic groups, as well as several prose extracts illuminating the break-up of Yugoslavia.

The translators include Ted Hughes, Kathleen Jamie, Francis Jones, Ruth Padel, Charles Simic, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Harry Clifton, among others.

Two of his Balkan essays, “The Stepinac File” (2000) and “A Week in Sarajevo” (1996), are widely known outside Ireland.

The first, which explores the collaboration of the Catholic Church with the fascist Ustaše regime in Croatia during the Second World War, has circulated extensively on the Internet.

The second, written at the end of the Bosnian war, achieved considerable civic renown when it appeared in translation in Sarajevo some months later.

His essay on the Kosova War, “A Day with the VJ” (2001), also concerns the Balkans.

In 2001, Agee participated in the “Struga Poetry Evenings” in North Macedonia, Southeastern Europe’s most distinguished poetry festival, which that year awarded its “Golden Wreath” to Seamus Heaney.

He founded Irish Pages in 2002, and (formally) The Irish Pages Press in 2018.

His co-editors are currently the poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie (Scotland's “Makar”, the national poet laureate), who is Scottish Editor; and the poet and scholar Meg Bateman, who is Scottish Gaelic Editor.

In 2003, Agee was an International Writing Fellow at the William Joiner Center, University of Massachusetts, Boston.

In 2007, he gave up his professional career in adult education to devote himself full-time to editing Irish Pages.

Previously in Belfast, he had worked as a Lecturer in Adult Literacy in a further education college (now Belfast Metropolitan); as a Tutor at The Open University (both full-time and part-time, including tutorials in HMP Maze and HMP Maghaberry); and as a Senior Lecturer employed by the University of Glamorgan to direct the Northern Irish branch of a British trade-union education programme.

Agee edited five books and several special issues of literary magazines before his  editorial work on all titles published by The Irish Pages Press.

Agee's own work is included in 12 anthologies, mainly of Irish and American poetry.

In 2007 and 2009, respectively, he was a writer-in-residence at the St James Cavalier Arts Centre in Malta, and at the Heinrich Böll Cottage, on Achill Island, Co Mayo.

Between 2012 and 2015 he was the Keith Wright Literary Fellow (Writer-in-residence) at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.

He has done readings at many festivals and venues in Ireland, Scotland, England, Croatia, Bosnia and the United States.

Agee has longstanding and close connections to the Balkans, in particular Croatia and Bosnia.

He spends part of each year at his house in Žrnovo, Croatia, and has visited Bosnia many times for substantial periods.