Christian Wiman

Christian Wiman is Senior Lecturer in Religion and Literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and teaches at the Yale Divinity School. He served as editor of Poetry Magazine from 2003 to 2013, a transformative decade during which the magazine’s circulation tripled and its international influence expanded significantly. Under his leadership, Poetry upheld its historic “Open Door” policy, publishing formal and experimental poets side by side while broadening its prose offerings. In 2011, the magazine received two awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence and best podcast.

Wiman is the author of four acclaimed poetry collections: Once in the West (2014), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Every Riven Thing, winner of the Ambassador Book Award and named by The New Yorker as one of the best poetry collections of 2010; Hard Night; and The Long Home, recipient of the Nicholas Roerich Prize. His prose works include the essay collection Ambition and Survival: On Becoming a Poet and the memoir My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (2013), which was selected as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Religion Books of the year. His translations of Osip Mandelstam appear in Stolen Air (2012).

A native of West Texas and a graduate of Washington and Lee University, Wiman has also taught at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and the Prague School of Economics. He is a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His poems and essays have appeared in leading publications including The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker.