Simmons, James, 1933-2001

James Simmons was born in 1933 in Derry, Northern Ireland. He attended the University of Leeds as a mature student in the late 1950's where he met lifelong friends Tony Harrison and Wole Soyinka. Simmons went on to teach English at Ahamadu Bello University in Nigeria, Friends School, Lisburn, and the New University of Ulster, Coleraine, and in 1989 was named Writer in Residence at Queens University of Belfast. In 1968, Simmons founded and edited The Honest Ulsterman, a prominent literary magazine in Ulster. He founded The Poets' House, which was a series of summer poetry conferences and later Ireland's first M.A. in Creative Writing, with wife, Janice Fitzpatrick Simmons in 1990. Simmons had seven children, five with first wife, Laura Stinson, one with Imelda Foley, and one with Janice Fitzpatrick. His published collections of poems include: Ten Poems, Ballad of a Marriage, Late but in Earnest, In the Wilderness and Other Poems, No Ties, No Land is Waste, Dr. Eliot, Energy to Burn, The Long Summer Still to Come, West Strand Visions, Memorials of a Tour in Yorkshire, Judy Garland and the Cold War, Constantly Singing, From the Irish, Sex, Rectitude, and Loneliness, Mainstream, and The Company of Children.

From the description of James Simmons papers, 1945-1996. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 122463331