Erica McAlpine grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. She is an Associate Professor of English at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, The New Statesman, The Spectator, The Yale Review, Stand, Ambit, and The American Scholar, among many other magazines; they have featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Radio. Her latest book of poems, Small Pointed Things, is now available from Carcanet. The Country Gambler, her first poetry collection, was published by Shearsman Books in 2016, and her academic book, The Poet’s Mistake (Princeton, 2020) was a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year” and reviewed widely in magazines including The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Guardian. It received the 2022 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from the British Academy.

McAlpine was born in Atlanta, Georgia and graduated from Harvard University before earning an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from Yale. Prior to her appointment at Oxford, she taught at several other universities—Villanova, Temple, the University of Pennsylvania, and Exeter. She now lives in North Oxford with her husband, son, daughter, dog, parrots, and tortoise. In addition to writing and teaching, she runs a popular reading series called Meet the Poet, which brings internationally celebrated poets to Oxford every year.

Contact: erica.mcalpine@ell.ox.ac.uk