Tyler Mills is the author of The City Scattered (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (Akron Poetry Prize winner, University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award winner, Southern Illinois University Press 2013), and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions Chapbook Prize, Diode Editions 2021). Her poems have appeared in The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Believer, and Poetry, and her essays in AGNI, Bennington Review, Brevity, Copper Nickel, and The Rumpus. The recipient of residencies from Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Vermont Studio Center, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, she recently served as the Jim and Linda Burke Scholar for the Doel Reed Center for the Arts in Taos, NM, sponsored by Oklahoma State University. 

Tyler’s new book, The Bomb Cloud, is an essay collection that investigates her grandfather’s possible involvement in the Nagasaki mission in conversation with the legacy of nuclear history in New Mexico, where she lived for four years.

What does it mean when your own link with a horrific event is, on the one hand, a family secret, and on the other hand an (as yet) unsolvable mystery? How does this personal connection to classified military information intertwine with stories half told to the public about bomb fallout, scale, and scope? And when does the self that lives in the shadow of a massive federal nuclear facility lose agency even while living and traveling through the open landscapes of New Mexico? The Bomb Cloud is a memoir-in-essays that investigates Tyler’s grandfather's experiences as a pilot tied to the Nagasaki bombing in World War II in conversation with the legacy of nuclear history in New Mexico, where she lived for four years in the shadow of the Los Alamos National Laboratory before moving to NYC.

Anthony Barnosky and a team of scientists have argued that the atomic bomb blast near Alamogordo, New Mexico in July of 1945 is what truly ushered the globe into the Anthropocene epoch, and the significance of Tyler’s project is tied to the global climate crisis we now face, as well as how near nuclear standoffs have called into question what it means to be a parent to future generations in the face of a substance that has threatened to obliterate humanity.

Tyler Mills teaches for the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, edits The Account, and lives in Brooklyn.

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