Adrian is from Co. Antrim. He graduated from University of Ulster with a BA in English & Politics, and MPhil in Anglo-Irish Literature. He has delivered writing workshops, readings, and lectures throughout the UK & Ireland, and America. His first poems appeared in Muck Island (1990), a collaboration with artist Ross Wilson. Copies of this box-set are housed in The Tate Gallery, and The Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1997, Rice received the Sir James Kilfedder Memorial Bursary for Emerging Artists. In 1999, as recipient of the US/Ireland Exchange Bursary, he was Poet-in-Residence at Lenoir-Rhyne College, Hickory, NC. First full poetry collection – The Mason’s Tongue (1999) – was shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Literary Prize, nominated for the Irish Times Prize for Poetry, and translated into Hungarian by Thomas Kabdebo (A Komuves Nyelve, 2005). In 2002, he co-edited A Conversation Piece: Poetry and Art (The Ulster Museum in association with Abbey Press). His poems and reviews have been broadcast internationally on radio and television, and have been published in several international magazines and journals. He has lectured, and given poetry readings, at several conferences, and published articles and book chapters on Irish literature, particularly on the subject of his MPhil thesis, the Presbyterian radical and United Irishman, Dr William Drennan (1754-1820). Selections of his poetry and prose have appeared in both The Belfast Anthology and The Ulster Anthology (Blackstaff Press, 1999 & 2006) and in Magnetic North: The Emerging Poets (Lagan Press, 2006). A chapbook, Hickory Haiku, was published in 2010 (FLP). Rice returned to Lenoir-Rhyne College as Visiting Writer-in-Residence for 2005. Since then, Adrian and his family have settled in Hickory. He has taught English and Creative Writing at Lenoir-Rhyne University, and Catawba Valley Community College, and also taught at Appalachian State University for the Reading Program. Accepting a full-time position in 2020, Rice is now Lecturer in First Year Seminar, and also a doctoral student, at App State. (His doctoral dissertation is entitled — ‘Education in Poetry: Learning through Poems’.) Rice has also teamed up with Hickory-based and fellow Belfastman, musician/songwriter Alan Mearns, to form ‘The Belfast Boys’, a dynamic Irish Traditional Music duo. Their album, Songs For Crying Out Loud, regularly airs across the Carolinas. Recent poetry titles, The Clock Flower (2013) and Hickory Station (2015), are both published by Press 53 (Winston-Salem). Hickory Station was nominated for the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, and a poem from Hickory Station, “Breath”, first published in the Asheville Poetry Review, was a Pushcart Prize nomination, and The Guardian’s ‘Poem of the Week’. His latest book is, The Strange Estate: New & Selected Poems 1986-2017 (Press 53). A new book of poems, The Chances of Harm (Press 53), is due in Spring 2023.