About

John James is the author of two full-length poetry collections, The Delusion of Being Absolute (Milkweed, forthcoming 2028) and The Milk Hours, selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize (Milkweed, 2019). He is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently Extinction Song (Tupelo, 2026), winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award. Recent poems appear in The Iowa Review, New England Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere.

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 holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia and is completing a PhD in English and critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley.