About

John James is the author of The Milk Hours, selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize (Milkweed, 2019), as well as two chapbooks: Chthonic, winner of the 2014 CutBank Chapbook Prize, and Winter, Glossolalia, forthcoming in 2022 from Black Spring Press Group. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, Best American Poetry, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, among other publications.

Also a scholar, John writes on poetry and poetics across a wide range of time, with specializations in Romanticism and ecocriticism. He has presented papers at Yale University, the University of Chicago, and NAVSA’s 2017 Victorian Preserves conference in Banff, Alberta. His dissertation explores the role of genre and poetic form in negotiating an emergent concept of environment in the later eighteenth century.

His work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and Georgetown University’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. He splits his time between Kentucky and California, where he is pursuing a PhD in English and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.