Joseph Woods (poet)

Joseph Woods (born 1966) is an Irish poet born in Drogheda, Ireland. He now lives in Rangoon, Burma with his wife and daughter and where he works as an editor and freelance writer.

Life

Born in 1966 he studied biology and chemistry and subsequently took an MA in poetry under the direction of James Simmons. Widely travelled, he lived in Japan in the early 1990s and travelled for long periods in Asia, in particular China and India and more recently Latin America. He now lives in Yangon, Myanmar. He was Director of Poetry Ireland, the national organisation for the support and promotion of poets and poetry from 2001 to 2013.

Woods has published three collections of poetry and for his first, Sailing to Hokkaido (2001) he won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2000.

As an editor he co-edited with Irene de Angelis Our Shared Japan (Dedalus Press 2007) an anthology of contemporary Irish poetry concerning Japan. He has edited numerous other poetry publications and more recently co-edited with Gerard Smyth, The Poetry Project, a web anthology of visual artists and filmmakers interpreting selected poems.

Dedalus Press reissued Woods' first two poetry collections in one volume entitled Cargo (2010) and in 2011 published his third collection Ocean Letters.

Ocean Letters, translated into Hungarian by Tomas Kabdebó was awarded the Irodalmi Jelen Prize 2013, presented jointly to the author and translator. In 2014 Woods was a recipient of the Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship.

Poetry Books

• Sailing to Hokkaido, (Worple Press 2001)
• Bearings, (Worple Press 2005)
• Cargo, (Dedalus Press 2010)
• Ocean Letters, (Dedalus Press 2011)
• Our Shared Japan, (Eds. Irene de Angelis & Joseph Woods, Afterword by Seamus Heaney), (Dedalus Press 2007)

External Links

• http://www.dedaluspress.com/sp/directory/details/joseph-woods
• http://thepoetryproject.ie/