James Brown's first book of poems Go Round Power Please won the Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry Award. His subsequent collections are Lemon, Favourite Monsters, The Year of the Bicycle, and Warm Auditorium (Victoria University Press). He is the author behind the useful, non-fiction booklet Instructions for Poetry Readings and, in 2005, edited The Nature of Things: Poems from the New Zealand Landscape. Brown has been a finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards three times. He teaches the Poetry Workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University, and is part of the Writing Team at Te Papa, New Zealand's national museum.