Chris Agee facts for kids

Chris Agee is an American writer, editor, and publisher who lives in Ireland. He is known for his poetry and essays. He also started and edits Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing, which is a magazine for new writing. He also runs The Irish Pages Press, which publishes books. Chris Agee has written four books of poems and one book of non-fiction that reads like poetry. He lives in Belfast, Ireland, and also spends time in Scotland and Croatia.

About Chris Agee

His Early Life

Chris Agee was born in San Francisco, USA. He grew up in different places like North Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bronxville, New York, and Block Island, Rhode Island. His father, Robert Cecil Agee, was a lawyer. His mother, Anne Marie Agee, worked as a legal secretary.

Chris has a younger sister named Elizabeth. His uncle, William Cameron Agee, was a famous art historian. Another uncle, Thomas Elmer Stanford, was important for studying music in Mexico.

Chris Agee

After high school, Chris spent a year studying in France. Then he went to Harvard University, where he studied English and American Literature. After graduating, he moved to Ireland.

At Harvard, he studied poetry and wrote his main paper about the poet W. H. Auden. His teachers, like the poet Robert Fitzgerald and the philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, greatly influenced his writing and thinking.

During his time in France and at Harvard, he became friends with people who later became famous. These include Monty Don, a TV presenter, and Mira Nair, a film-maker.

Life and Work in Northern Ireland

Chris Agee started writing poems in his last year at Harvard. However, his first poems were not published until the late 1980s in Irish magazines.

He has published several poetry collections. His book Next to Nothing (2008) was even nominated for a special award in Britain. His latest poetry book, Blue Sandbar Moon, came out in 2018. He also wrote a unique book called Trump Rant (2021), which mixes poetry and non-fiction.

In 2002, he started Irish Pages, a journal for writers. Later, in 2018, he officially launched The Irish Pages Press. He works with other talented writers as editors, like Kathleen Jamie, who is Scotland's national poet.

In 2007, Chris decided to focus full-time on editing Irish Pages. Before that, he worked in adult education in Belfast. He taught adult literacy and also worked at The Open University, even teaching in prisons.

His Writing Career

Chris Agee has edited many books and special issues of literary magazines. He now oversees all the books published by The Irish Pages Press.

His own poems are featured in 12 different collections of poetry. These are mainly Irish and American poetry books.

He has also written many poems, reviews, and articles for The Irish Times newspaper since the 1990s.

Some of his essays about the Balkan region are well-known. One essay, "A Week in Sarajevo" (1996), was about his visit to Sarajevo after the Bosnian war. It was very popular when it was translated and published there. Another essay, "A Day with the VJ" (2001), was about the Kosova War.

He has also written many well-known essays about Ireland. These include "Weather Report: Good Friday Week, 1998" and "Heaney's Blackbird" (2007). Many of these essays appeared in Irish Pages, The Yale Review, or The Irish Times.

In 2001, Chris Agee took part in the "Struga Poetry Evenings" festival in North Macedonia. This is a very important poetry festival in Southeastern Europe. That year, the famous poet Seamus Heaney won the top award there.

Chris has also been a writer-in-residence at different places. This means he lived and worked as a writer there for a period. He was at the University of Massachusetts in Boston in 2003. He also spent time in Malta and on Achill Island in Ireland. From 2012 to 2015, he was a writer-in-residence at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. He has given readings of his work at many festivals in Ireland, Scotland, England, Croatia, Bosnia, and the United States.

Connections to the Balkans

Chris Agee has strong connections to the Balkan region, especially Croatia and Bosnia. He spends part of each year at his house in Žrnovo, Croatia. He has also visited Bosnia many times.

In 1996, he visited Sarajevo during the end of a long war there. He went to take part in a festival because of his writings about the Bosnian War.

During his visit, he met many Bosnian writers and artists. He also saw the city being freed as the forces attacking it left. His essay "A Week in Sarajevo" was published soon after.

Chris edited Scar on the Stone (1998), which was the first English book of Bosnian literature published after the Bosnian war. It included poems from 19 important Bosnian poets. Famous translators like Ted Hughes and Kathleen Jamie helped with the book. This book was praised as a very important work about the Bosnian war.

In 1999, Chris's family bought a house in Žrnovo, a small village in Croatia.

His poetry book First Light (2003) includes poems about the Balkans. These poems are some of the few written by a Western poet about the time right after the wars in Bosnia and Kosova.

In 2015, he edited Balkan Essays/Balkansi eseji. This book by Hubert Butler was published in both English and Croatian.

In 2019, a Croatian publisher released a bilingual edition of Chris's book Next to Nothing/Gotovo ništa.

Personal Life

Chris Agee has a son named Jacob Eoin Agee. Jacob is a talented translator who translates books from Croatian to English.

Chris also had a daughter, Miriam Aoife Agee, who sadly passed away at age four in 2001. His two poetry books, Next to Nothing (2008) and Blue Sandbar Moon (2018), are about this difficult time and how he dealt with the loss.

What People Say About His Work

On Next to Nothing

This book is about the years after the death of his daughter in 2001. People say it is a very honest and moving book about grief.

The poet Hugh Dunkerley called it "a profound and exceptionally moving book." He said it made him feel the importance of life and showed how powerful poetry can be.

On Blue Sandbar Moon

This book came out ten years after Next to Nothing. It is a collection of 174 short, connected poems. It explores feelings and thoughts after a big loss.

The poet Ciarán O’Rourke said it explores "the emotional and spiritual landscape of a life sustained in 'the aftermath of the aftermath'." He described it as a "mosaic of days and hours" that is easy to read but also very deep.

The novelist David Park called it "a monumental work" that covers both European places and deep inner feelings.

The critic Benjamin Keatinge said Blue Sandbar Moon shows how a small, personal event can connect to bigger historical events. He also noted how it tries to express loss and sadness.

Chris Agee himself has discussed both books together, seeing them as one big work about dealing with loss over time.

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