John James
John James is the author of one full-length poetry collection, The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), which was selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, as well as three chapbooks, most recently the forthcoming Extinction Song (Tupelo, 2026), winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award.
Bio and Featured Works
John James is the author of one full-length poetry collection, The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), which was selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, as well as three chapbooks, most recently the forthcoming 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, Best American Poetry, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.John is also a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, with a focus on poetry and poetics and environmental literature. His dissertation, Catastrophe and Revolution: Environmental Poetics in the British Eighteenth Century, explores an emergent form of environmental activism in the poetry, philosophy, and science of Britain's long eighteenth century. Recent scholarship appears in The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays (University of Iowa Press), A Companion to William Blake (Routledge), Literature Compass, and, with Nathan K. Hensley, in BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History.
He is completing a PhD in English and critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
PUBLICATIONS
Full-length Poetry Collections
The Milk Hours. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2019. Selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize.
Poetry Chapbooks
Extinction Song. North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, forthcoming 2026. Selected by Monica Ferrell for the Snowbound Chapbook Award.
Winter, Glossolalia. London: Black Spring Press Group, 2022.
Chthonic. Missoula, MT: CutBank Books, 2015. Winner of the CutBank Chapbook Award.
Selected Individual Poems
"Dirge." The Iowa Review, forthcoming.
"Future Perfect." Los Angeles Review of Books, Summer 2025.
"Action in the Infinitive" and "Infinite Gyre of Possible Ends." The Hopkins Review, Summer 2024.
"Epicurus" and "The Field Which Had Been a Meadow Once." New England Review, Fall 2023.
"Lullably." Poem-a-Day, April 2023. Winner of the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize.
Articles and Book Chapters
“William Blake and the Environment of Abolition.” A Companion to William Blake, ed. Kathryn S. Freeman. New York: Routledge, FORTHCOMING.
“Origins of Rupture: Emerson, Wheatley, and the Early American Sonnet.” The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, ed. Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2023.
“Blake’s Debt: Artisanship and the Future of Labor.” Literature Compass. March 2022.
“Soot Moth: Biston Betularia and the Victorian End of Nature.” Co-written with Nathan K. Hensley. BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth Century History, 2018.