Chris Agee

Christopher Robert Agee (born 18 January 1956 in San Francisco) 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 also spends part of each year at his house on the Dalmatian island of Korčula, near Dubrovnik, in Croatia.

Biography

Early life

Chris Agee was born on 18 January 1956 in San Francisco and grew up in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. During the last three years of secondary school, he attended Phillips Academy (Andover), before spending a year of French language study at the Université d’Aix-en-Provence, in the South of France. He then attended Harvard University, where he studied with the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, and the Brazilian philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger. He took Fitzgerald’s renowned prosody seminar and wrote his senior thesis on W.H. Auden, also under the former’s supervision. His Harvard friends included Mira Nair, Julie Agoos and André Aciman. During the summers of 1977 and 1978, he worked as a research assistant in Ireland for the American non-fiction writer Robert Coles, who was preparing a series of articles on the Northern Troubles. In June 1979, he graduated cum laude with a BA in American Literature and Language. Since 1979, just after graduation, he has lived in Ireland.