Chris Agee was born on January 18, 1956, in San Francisco, California, to Robert Cecil Agee, a lawyer, and Anne Marie (Stanford) Agee, a legal secretary. He grew up in Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island. After high school at Phillips Academy Andover and a year at the Université d'Aix-en-Provence, he attended Harvard University, where he received his BA in English and American Literature and Language. After graduating, Agee moved to Ireland, where he would remain.
He wrote and published multiple collections of poetry including In the New Hampshire Woods (1992), First Light (2003), and Next to Nothing (2008), which was shortlisted in Britain for the 2009 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Its sequel, Blue Sandbar Moon, appeared in 2018, followed by a new work of “poetic non-fiction”, Trump Rant (2021).
In 2002, Agee founded Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing, and since 2007, he worked full-time as Editor of the journal. He also writes as a reviewer for The Irish Times. Between 2013 and 2015, he was the Keith Wright Literary Fellow at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, where he remained a Visiting Scholar in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences for two further years. In 2018, he formally founded The Irish Pages Press/Cló An Mhíl Bhuí, which publishes eight titles of poetry and non-fiction annually.
