John Patrick James is an American poet, critic, and digital collagist. He is the author of The Milk Hours, selected by Henri Cole for the 2018 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. He is also the author of Chthonic, winner of the 2014 CutBank Chapbook Competition. His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Best New Poets 2013 and 2016, Best American Poetry 2017, and other publications.
James was born in Los Angeles, California and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. He earned an M.F.A. in creative writing (poetry) from Columbia University's School of the Arts and an M.A. in English literature at Georgetown University, where he served as graduate associate to the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. James has taught at the University of the District of Columbia, The Potomac School, and Georgetown University, where he directs the Creative Writing Institute. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is a Ph.D. student in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
His book reviews have been published in Boston Review, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review Online, and The Iowa Review. His collages are published in Quarterly West.
Of The Milk Hours, prize judge Henri Cole writes, "âÂÂThe poetry of the earth is intensely alive in the poems of John James... Out of the sorrowful fragments of personal history, [he] has a created a book of unusual intelligence and beauty.âÂÂ