Ralph J. Mills Jr.

Born in Chicago, scholar and poet Ralph Mills earned a BA from Lake Forest College and an MA and PhD from Northwestern University, and also studied at Oxford University. Mills is the author of 13 volumes of poetry, including Living with Distance (1979), winner of the Society of Midland Authors Prize for Poetry; March Light (1983), winner of the Carl Sandburg Award; and Grasses Standing: Selected Poems (2000), winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize. His poems are noted for their objectivist, terse style, and frequent use of images.
 
As a scholar, Mills contributed widely to twentieth century verse by editing the letters of Theodore Roethke, the notebooks of David Ignatow, and the anthology Contemporary American Poetry (1965). Throughout his career, Mills produced criticism on writers such as James Wright, Wallace Stevens, Samuel Beckett, and Richard Eberhart. Mills’ criticism and verse appeared in the Chicago Sun Times, American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry, and elsewhere, and much of his criticism was collected in his final book, Essays on Poetry (2003).
 
Mills taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago until his retirement in 1997. His papers are held at the University of Chicago Library.