CJ Scruton is a writer, editor, and educator who grew up in the Lower Mississippi River Valley. They received their Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and currently teach as an Assistant Professor of Writing and Humanities at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design.

In more than 10 years of experience in education, publishing, and communication, Scruton has brought a wide variety of interests and areas of expertise to their students and clients, from the rhetorics of horror media to political and cultural reporting to technical and professional writing. Scruton’s editorial work over the years has included national publications and presses such as Cream City Review, Zone 3, and Steel Toe Books, and they are the founder and editor-in-chief of R2! Press and the MIAD student journal R2.

Scruton’s creative work has been featured in publications such as The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Shenandoah, The Journal, Foglifter, New South, North American Review, Puerto del Sol, CutBank, Salamander, and many others. Their poetry has received multiple nominations for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize and been recognized among the finalists for the Trio House Press Trio Award, the YesYes Books Pamet River Prize, and the Willow Springs Books Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize.

Scruton’s scholarly writing has most recently appeared in Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic and the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, and they were the guest co-editor for the spring 2023 special issue of the Hawthorne Review focusing on environment in 19th-century North America.