CJ Scruton is a poet, sound artist, and editor who grew up in the Lower Mississippi River Valley. Scruton’s debut poetry-performance collection, Suite for Hallucinated Voices, is available for pre-order now from Half Mystic Press.

Their creative work has been featured in publications such as The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Shenandoah, Foglifter, New South, and many others, and their poetry has received multiple nominations for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. Alongside their live performances, Scruton’s sound installations have been exhibited at galleries and museums across the Midwest.

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 investigative reporting to technical and professional writing. Scruton’s editorial work has included national publications and presses such as Cream City Review and Zone 3, and they are the founder and editor-in-chief of R2! Press and the MIAD student journal R2!