Christopher Robert Agee is a poet, essayist and editor living in Ireland. He holds dual American and Irish citizenship, and has spent most of his adult life in Ireland. He spends part of each year on the Dalmatian island of Korčula, near Dubrovnik, in Croatia.
During the summers of 1977 and '78, Agee was based in the Wicklow Mountains and Belfast. By the mid-1980s his residence in Belfast became permanent. Between 1979 and 1989, he worked as a lecturer in adult literacy. From 1989 to 1992, he worked full-time for the Community Education Department of The Open University in Ireland; from 1988 to 2004, he also taught a number of arts and American studies courses in the Arts Faculty of The Open University, including individual tutorials, for 10 years, with republican and loyalist prisoners at the Maze and Maghaberry Prisons. From 1992 to 2007, he was employed by the University of East London to direct the Irish office of a British trade union education fund. Since 2007, when he resigned from that post, he has worked as the full-time Editor of Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing as well as in a freelance literary capacity, including as a reviewer for The Irish Times. His wife, whom he married in 1990, grew up in Armagh and studied art and design at the University of Ulster in Belfast. Their first child, Jacob Eoin, was born in 1993, and their second, Miriam Aoife, in 1997. Miriam died suddenly in 2001. The poems in Agee's third collection, Next to Nothing, were written in the aftermath of her death.
Published work and literary activity
Agee wrote his first poems during his last year at Harvard. The first appeared in Irish periodicals in the late 1980s. He is now the author of three books of poems, In the New Hampshire Woods, First Light and Next to Nothing. Next to Nothing was shortlisted for the first Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, funded by thePoet Laureate and organised by the Poetry Society in London. Agee is currently finalizing a collection of non-fiction and critical essays, entitled Journey to Bosnia. Agee's work is included in seven anthologies of Irish poetry and one of American poetry. In 2001, he participated in the Struga Festival, Eastern Europe’s most distinguished poetry festival, which that year awarded its "Golden Wreath" to Seamus Heaney. In 2003, Agee was an International Writing Fellow at the William Joiner Center, University of Massachusetts, Boston. In 2007 and 2009, respectively, he was a writer-in-residence at the St James CavalierArts Centre in Malta, and at the Heinrich Boll Cottage, on Achill Island, Co Mayo.
Essays and criticism
Agee's forthcoming collection of prose, Journey to Bosnia, brings together essays and reviews on a variety of Irish, Balkan, literary and ecological topics written since 1986. He reviews mainly poetry for The Irish Times. Two of his Balkan essays, "The Stepinac File" and "A Week in Sarajevo", are widely known outside Ireland. The first, which explores the collaboration of the Catholic Church with the fascist Ustashe regime in Croatia during the Second World War, has been 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.
Editorial work
In 2002, Agee founded Irish Pages, It has been variously described as "a wonderful achievement" ; "an important event in the history of Northern Ireland" ; "a major development in Irish literature" ; and "the most important cultural journal in Ireland at the present moment".
Balkan connections
Chris Agee has close connections with the Balkans, Croatia and Bosnia in particular. He spends two months each year at his house in Žrnovo, on the island of Korčula, in the far south of Croatia, and has visited Bosnia for substantial periods many times. His second collection, First Light, includes a suite of Balkan poems written in the mid- to late 1990s, and thus constitutes one of the very rare firsthand responses, from an English-language or Western poet, to the postwar aftermath in Bosnia and Kosovo. During the same period, he wrote occasional articles on Western policy in the Balkans for Oslobodjene, the Sarajevo daily. Agee edited Scar on the Stone, the first English-language anthology of Bosnian poetry published after the outbreak of the Bosnian war and the subsequent genocide and partition. It brings together 14 of Bosnia's poets and a selection of younger poets drawn from the country's three main ethnic groups.
