James Shea

James Shea graduated with a BA in English and philosophy from Loyola University Chicago in 1998 and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2001. 

Shea is the author of Last Day of My Face (University of Iowa Press, 2025), winner of the 2024 Iowa Poetry Prize, and The Lost Novel (2014) and Star in the Eye (2008), both from Fence Books. He is the co-translator, with Sayumi Kamakura, of Applause for a Cloud: New Haiku (Black Ocean, 2024), and of Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong (Zephyr Press, 2022), with Dorothy Tse. He is the coeditor, with Grant Caldwell, of The Routledge Global Haiku Reader (Routledge, 2023). 

Shea has received grants from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Vermont Arts Council. In 2019, he received an artist residency at the Tomaž Šalamun Poetry Centre in Slovenia.

Shea has taught at DePaul University, Columbia College Chicago, the University of Chicago, and Nebraska Wesleyan University. He has also served as a poet in residence in Chicago’s public schools. Shea is currently an associate professor and director of the creative and professional writing program at Hong Kong Baptist University. He also serves as the poetry reviews editor for the Hong Kong Review of Books and as an advisor to the Hong Kong International Literary Festival.