Lucy Alford is assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University, specializing in twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry and comparative poetics. Having graduated with a BA from UVA, she earned a PhD in Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen and a PhD in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Her celebrated 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 transhistorical elements of poetic form in terms of the human vital signs and vital needs amid contemporary conditions of political and environmental precarity. Alford’s essays have appeared in a range of edited volumes and scholarly journals, including Comparative Literature, Modern Language Notes, and Philosophy & Literature. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and have appeared in such journals as Harpur Palate, Streetlight, Literary Matters, The Warwick Review, Action, Spectacle, Atelier (in Italian translation), and FENCE.