Philip Brady was born and raised in New York City and received a B.A. from  Bucknell University, M.A.s from the University of Delaware and San Francisco State University, and a Ph.D. in English from SUNY Binghamton.

His poetry and fiction have appeared in over fifty journals in the United States and Ireland, including Abraxas, The Belfast Gown Literary Supplement, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Graham House Review, The Honest Ulsterman, The Journal of Irish Literature, The Laurel Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Pacific International, Poetry Northwest and other journals. Translated into French, Spanish, Polish, Norwegian, and Hebrew, his poems have been published internationally. 

His essays have appeared in College English, The Arkansas Quarterly, the Centennial Review, Connecticut Review, Thought & Action, Writing on the Edge, and The Radical Teacher. Brady has co-edited, with James F. Carens, Critical Essays on James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Twayne1998).

His work has received three Ohio Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowships (poetry 1993 & 99; criticism 1999), a Newhouse Award and a Thayer Fellowship in the Arts from New York State, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Listowel Writer's Prize (Ireland), and residencies at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, The Virginia Center for the Arts, Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), The Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), and Cimelice Castle (Czech Republic). He has also been a visiting lecturer at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and the Poets' House in Donegal, Ireland.

Brady has taught at many universities in the United States, as well as University College Cork in Ireland and, as a Peace Corps Volunteer, at the National University of Zaire. Currently he teaches at Youngstown State University, where he was named Distinguished Professor in Scholarship in 1999.