2019 Visiting Scholar
Tyler Mills
2019 Jim & Linda Burke Visiting Scholar
Tyler Mills is a multi-genre writer. She is the author of two award-winning collections of poetry, Hawk Parable, and Tongue Lyre. She is writing a collection of essays titled Afterimage, selections of which have recently appeared in AGNI, The Rumpus and Poetry, as well as a poetry manuscript-in-progress titled Children of the Flood.
She holds degrees from Bucknell University (BA), the University of Maryland (MFA), and the University of Illinois-Chicago (PhD). Her poems have appeared widely, including The New Yorker, The Guardian, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Believer, and New England Review; won magazine awards from Gulf Coast, the Crab Orchard Review, and Third Coast; and been featured in the Academy of American Poets “Poem-a-Day” digital series. Her creative nonfiction won the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize in Prose and has also appeared in AGNI, Cherry Tree, the Collagist, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her visual work has been shown in the Piano Roll Project, Bates Mill Complex (Lewiston, ME) and published in Poetry.
Tyler Mills is editor-in-chief of The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought, an online magazine of new writing that she co-founded, and she has taught at universities in Maryland, Chicago, and New Mexico. She is on faculty at 24PearlStreet, the online writing program for the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and lives in Brooklyn.
You can learn more about Tyler Mills on her website.
"Hawk Parable: A Poetry Reading"
As the 2019 Jim and Linda Burke Visiting Scholar, Tyler Mills did a poetry reading from the collection "Hawk Parable" at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, February 18, 2020 in OSU, Stillwater.
Hawk Parable begins with a family mystery and engages with the limits of historical knowledge. These poems explore a space between environmental crisis and a crisis of conscience.
Hawk Parable moves from a meditation on the author's grandfather's possible involvement in the Nagasaki mission and moves into poems that engage with the legacy of nuclear testing on our global environment. This book enacts what it means to encounter fragments--of historical records, family stories, and survivor accounts--through exploring a variety of forms. Hawk Parable seeks what it means to be human in the spaces between tragedy and beauty, loss and life, in the relationships between the lyric speaker, history, and personal memory.