Christian Wiman

Raised in the small West Texas town of Snyder, he graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College, and the Prague School of Economics. In 2003, he became editor of the oldest American magazine of verse, Poetry, a role he stepped down from in June 2013. Wiman is now on the faculty of Yale University, where he teaches courses on Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. His first book of poetry, The Long Home (Story Line Press, 1997) and reprinted by Copper Canyon Press (2007), won the Nicholas Roerich Prize. His 2010 book, Every Riven Thing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), was chosen by poet and critic Dan Chiasson as one of the best poetry books of 2010. His book Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) reviewed by The New York Times Book Review, is "a collection of personal essays and critical prose on a wide range of subjects: reading Paradise Lost in Guatemala, recalling violent episodes from the poet's youth, traveling in Africa with an eccentric father, as well as a series of penetrating essays on poets, poetry, and poetry's place in our lives. The book’s final essay discusses Wiman's diagnosis of macroglobulinemia, a rare cancer, and a clear-eyed declaration of what it means — for an artist and a person — to have faith in the face of death." His poems, criticism, and personal essays appear widely in such magazines as The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker and The Sewanee Review. Clive James describes Wiman's poems as being “insistent on being read aloud, in a way that so much from America is determined not to be. His rhymes and line-turnovers are all carefully placed to intensify the speech rhythms, making everything dramatic: not shoutingly so, but with a steady voice that tells an ideal story every time.”

• Collections • The Long Home (Copper Canyon Press, 1998), poetry, 96 pages, • Hard Night (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), poetry, 96 pages, • Every Riven Thing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), poetry, 112 pages, • Once In The West (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), poetry, 128 pages, • Hammer Is The Prayer: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), poetry, 224 pages, • Survival Is A Style (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), poetry, 112 pages, • List of poems • Title — |Year — |First published — |Reprinted/collected • After the ballet — 2023 • Translations • Stolen Air: The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (Ecco, 2012) • Anthologies (as contributor) *

• Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) • My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) • He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) • Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023) • White Buffalo (Harpers, 2021)

• The Tune of Things (Harper's Magazine, December 2025)

* • Casey Cep, “Close to the Bone: The Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith,” Life & Letters, The New Yorker, December 11, 2023