James is an Australian poet, diarist and short story writer currently living in Washington, DC. He holds a Masters in Creative Writing and has received various awards for his work, including the Australian Society of Authors Emerging Poet of the Year.
He has two collections of poetry to his name – ‘Staying Whole While Falling Apart’ (2021, IP) and ‘Tickets to the Fall of Icarus’ (2023, IP). His poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals at home and abroad, including Griffith Review, Meanjin, Rattle, Shot Glass Journal and Open Minds Quarterly Review.
James taught English at the University of Sydney for well over a decade until taking fulltime refuge in the Blue Mountains with the onset of the pandemic. There he climbed the cliffs and ran the trails in search of emotional truth and dreamscapes. He also established the Inkling Writers – creative writing and poetry workshops – for the upper mountains community. The group flourished for a good three years under James’s stewardship. In 2025, he reluctantly left the group to their own not-inconsiderable devices when he departed for the USA.
James is currently fine-tuning his third collection of poetry for publication, tentatively titled, ‘My Year of Writing Dangerously’, a hybrid of poetry and diary that explores bridges between the personal and political, the individual and global.
James subscribes to the view that writing well is synonymous with living well. Some features that he has come to believe infuse good living and good writing include an open and inclusive approach to creativity; a default reliance on warmth and compassion, oomph and authenticity, grace, humour and surprise; also a robustly tuned BS detector that doesn’t preclude the self.
James cherishes writing because it allows us to have another go and yet another go, ultimately granting us the privilege of figuring out how to guide ourselves and our work into better shape and a shapeliness that bears the power and mystery to entertain and inspire others and to make space for them – especially those unlike ourselves – and hopefully to convey the wondrous complexities of being human in prevailing times.
James is the father of two dear adult children who, remotely and unbeknownst, keep the writing real and honest, poised fleetingly between the leaves on the valley floor and the wisps of cloud above.