Biography
Before coming to Chicago, James Garwood-Cole lived in London and Brighton, England. James works primarily (though not only) with avant-garde anglophone poetries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and is concerned with the possibilities of poetics as thought: contra the prosaic, the positive, and narrative as such. Their research investigates how these possibilities interact with, diagnose, and undermine logics of valuation, exchange, and received notions of the commensurable in the expanded—that is, the social, cultural, and aesthetic—field.
James is currently at work on their dissertation, “The Value of Frank O’Hara,” which takes the problem of how we value Frank O’Hara, and how Frank O’Hara values, as its starting point and nominal anchor. Chapters both completed and proposed concern e/valuation procedures in O’Hara’s work related to: reading practice, painterly and poetic abstraction, the imbrications of racial-sexual economies and commodity markets, and seriousness.
James is also a poet. For the Brighton-based ‘Hi Zero’ reading series and press, the z-fold pamphlet Room Sequence was written, printed with Risograph, and circulated, in 2019. The chapbook Two Arguments (2025) was published by The Year in Chicago and it was also Risograph printed. Their first full-length collection is forthcoming in Spring 2027 and is called ORANGES. New work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbox Manifold, LUDD GANG, mercury firs, Revue Transat’, and Annulet.
James Garwood-Cole has since 2024 served as the Editor of Chicago Review. They became Co-Editor in 2023. Since 1946, Chicago Review has published a range of contemporary poetry, fiction, and criticism. Their office is in Taft House at the University of Chicago.