Author photo: Russell Kleyn
James Brown describes himself as ‘a Sunday poet who fell in with the wrong crowd’. His poetry collections are Slim Volume (2024), The Tip Shop (2022), Selected Poems (2020), Floods Another Chamber (2017), Warm Auditorium (2012), The Year of the Bicycle (2006), which was a finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007, Favourite Monsters (2002), Lemon (1999) and Go Round Power Please (1996), which won the Best First Book Award for Poetry. His poems are widely anthologised and often appear in the annual anthology Best New Zealand Poems.
James has been the recipient of several writing fellowships, including the 1994 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary and a share of the 2000 Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship. In 2001 he was the Canterbury University Writer in Residence, and in 2002 he was one of four New Zealand writers shortlisted for the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters. James was the Victoria University of Wellington Writer in Residence in 2004. He edited The Nature of Things: Poems from the New Zealand Landscape (Craig Potton, 2005), the literary magazine Sport from 1993 to 2000, and Best New Zealand Poems 2008. In 2002, as Dr Ernest M Bluespire, he published the useful booklet Instructions for Poetry Readings (Braunias University Press). In 2018, James created what he calls ‘a transcribed poem’ out of Herbert Morrison’s famous radio commentary of the Hindenburg disaster: ‘Hindenburg: a transcribed poem’, and also produced the small booklet Songs of the Humpback Whale. In 2019, Alan Gregg, formerly of the band the Mutton Birds, turned two of James’s poems (‘Shrinking Violet’ and ‘Peculiar Julia’) into songs.
James works as an editor and teaches the Poetry Workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
James Brown describes himself as ‘a Sunday poet who fell in with the wrong crowd’. His poetry collections are Slim Volume (2024), The Tip Shop (2022), Selected Poems (2020), Floods Another Chamber (2017), Warm Auditorium (2012), The Year of the Bicycle (2006), which was a finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007, Favourite Monsters (2002), Lemon (1999) and Go Round Power Please (1996), which won the Best First Book Award for Poetry. His poems are widely anthologised and often appear in the annual anthology Best New Zealand Poems.
James has been the recipient of several writing fellowships, including the 1994 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary and a share of the 2000 Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship. In 2001 he was the Canterbury University Writer in Residence, and in 2002 he was one of four New Zealand writers shortlisted for the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters. James was the Victoria University of Wellington Writer in Residence in 2004. He edited The Nature of Things: Poems from the New Zealand Landscape (Craig Potton, 2005), the literary magazine Sport from 1993 to 2000, and Best New Zealand Poems 2008. In 2002, as Dr Ernest M Bluespire, he published the useful booklet Instructions for Poetry Readings (Braunias University Press). In 2018, James created what he calls ‘a transcribed poem’ out of Herbert Morrison’s famous radio commentary of the Hindenburg disaster: ‘Hindenburg: a transcribed poem’, and also produced the small booklet Songs of the Humpback Whale. In 2019, Alan Gregg, formerly of the band the Mutton Birds, turned two of James’s poems (‘Shrinking Violet’ and ‘Peculiar Julia’) into songs.
James works as an editor and teaches the Poetry Workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
