Lucy Alford & John Douglas Millar

Lucy Alford

Lucy Alford specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry and poetics, as well as transnational and trans-historical poetries in English, French, German, and Arabic. As both a practicing poet and a teacher of poetry, Alford is particularly interested in sensory life, experimentation, and the roles of habit, constraint, and play in creative processes. Her research and teaching centre on poetry’s intersections with lived, attentive experience.

Alford’s first book, Forms of Poetic Attention (Columbia UP, 2020), examines the forms of attention both required and produced in poetic language, bringing both philosophical and cognitive inquiry into conversation with the inner workings of specific poems. Her second scholarly project, Vital Signs, considers trans-historical elements of poetic form (line, meter, stanza) in terms of the human vital signs and vital needs (breath, pulse, shelter) – as signs of life and forms of sustenance amid contemporary conditions of political and environmental precarity.

Alford’s scholarly writings have appeared in a range of journals and edited volumes, including Comparative Literature, Modern Language Notes, and Philosophy & Literature. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in such journals as Harpur Palate, Streetlight, Literary Matters, The Warwick Review, Action, Spectacle, Atelier (in Italian translation), and Fence.

John Douglas Millar

John Douglas Millar is a writer, poet and researcher based in London. His book of literary essays, Brutalist Readings, was published by Sternberg Press (London) in 2016.

He writes regularly for Afterall, Art Monthly, Apartamento, e-flux Criticism, Frieze, Mute, Radical Philosophy and The White Review, amongst others. Since 2018 he has been working on a book about photographer Peter Hujar and the discipline of art history entitled Nude Opera.