James Brown describes himself as 'a Sunday poet who fell in with the wrongcrowd'. His previous poetry collections are The Tip Shop (2022), SelectedPoems (2020), Floods Another Chamber (2017), Warm Auditorium (2012),The Year of the Bicycle (2006), which was a finalist in the Montana NewZealand Book Awards 2007, Favourite Monsters (2002), Lemon (1999), and GoRound Power Please (1996), which won the Best First Book Award for Poetry.James has been the recipient of several writing fellowships, including the1994 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary and a share of the 2000 BuddleFindlay Sargeson Fellowship. In 2001 he was the Canterbury UniversityWriter in Residence, and in 2002 he was one of four New Zealand writersshortlisted for the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters. He was the VictoriaUniversity of Wellington Writer in Residence in 2004. He edited The Natureof Things: Poems from the New Zealand Landscape (Craig Potton, 2005),the literary magazine Sport from 1993 to 2000, and Best New Zealand Poems2008. In 2002, as Dr Ernest M Bluespire, James published the useful bookletInstructions for Poetry Readings (Braunias University Press). In 2018, hecreated what he calls 'a transcribed poem' out of Herbert Morrison's famousradio commentary of the Hindenburg disaster: 'Hindenburg: a transcribedpoem', and also produced the small booklet Songs of the Humpback Whale.

In 2019, Alan Gregg, formerly of the band the Mutton Birds, turned two ofJames's poems ('Shrinking Violet' and 'Peculiar Julia') into songs.James works as an editor and teaches the Poetry Workshop at theInternational Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington.