Nationality Irish | ||
 | ||
Full Name James Christopher O'Sullivan Born May 1986 Cork, Ireland Occupation Writer, publisher, academic Books Kneeling on the Redwood Floor, Groundwork | ||
James Christopher O'Sullivan (born 1986) is an Irish writer, publisher, editor, and academic from Cork city. He is most notable as the founding editor of New Binary Press, the author of two collections of poetry, and the writer and editor of several critical texts, including Reading Modernism with Machines (2016).
Contents
Academia
O'Sullivan is involved in the study of Digital Humanities, and has a particular interest in computer-assisted text analysis and new media studies. He has held faculty positions at various institutions around the world, including Pennsylvania State University and the University of Sheffield. O'Sullivan is Chair of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute Colloquium at the University of Victoria. In 2014, he was shortlisted for the Fortier Prize for Digital Humanities research.
He co-edited Reading Modernism with Machines with Shawna Ross, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016.
Publishing
In 2012, O'Sullivan founded New Binary Press, a publishing house dedicated to the publication of both print and electronic literature. New Binary Press has published a number of established authors, including Nick Montfort, Stephanie Strickland, and Karl Parkinson. The venture has had a lot of critical success; Graham Allen's The One That Got Away was shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award 2015, while Unexplained Fevers by Jeannine Hall Gailey came second in the 2014 Science Fiction Poetry Association's Elgin Award.
In 2016, one of the press' flagship works, Graham Allen's one-line-a-day digital poem, Holes, reached its 10-year anniversary. In early 2017, in an interview with Books Ireland magazine, O'Sullivan said that New Binary Press was operating at a loss, though he seemed confident of press' future, claiming that "the value of dissonance outweights that of cents". Despite his profile as a digital publisher and scholar, O'Sullivan believes that print books have far greater "material and cultural importance" than digital formats, describing Kindle and iTunes as a "dangerous axis of power". In the same article, O'Sullivan outlined his belief that Irish writing can come from many perspectives, and is simply "literature that is embedded in the very soul of our island".
Writing
O'Sullivan's first collection of poetry, Kneeling on the Redwood Floor, was released by Lapwing Publications in 2011, a work which the author himself did not rate very highly. In 2014, Alba Publishing released his second collection, Groundwork. O'Sullivan's poetry has been published in a number of prestigious journals, magazines and periodicals, including The SHOp, Cyphers, Southword, and Crannóg.
In 2016, O'Sullivan was placed third in the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize. He has also been shortlisted for Fish Poetry Prize in both 2015 and 2016, as well as the Fish Short Story Prize 2014/15. He received a High Commendation in Munster Literature Centre Fool for Poetry 2014 International Chapbook Competition and 2013 Charles Macklin Poetry Prize.
O'Sullivan writes for the Evening Echo, a regional newspaper in Cork. He has worked particularly closely with Feis Maitiú Corcaigh, a major cultural festival, as their resident journalist.
Personal
O'Sullivan was born and raised in Cork city, Ireland. O'Sullivan has often expressed great affection for his home town. He is the grandson of a locally-famed performer, Billa O'Connell. O'Sullivan attended Coláiste an Spioraid Naoimh, where he took the Irish Leaving Certificate Examinations. O'Sullivan did not enjoy his time at school. He is a graduate of Cork Institute of Technology, University College Cork, and University College Dublin.
In 2016, O'Sullivan was very vocal in his support for the beleaguered Cork Film Festival.