Christian Wiman

Christian Wiman currently serves as the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School. From 2003 until 2013, he was the editor of Poetry, the premiere magazine for poetry in the English-speaking world.

"[My scholarship] is in direct conversation with the whole history of poetry. I agree with [T.S.] Eliot that there’s one moment of poetry. I see William Wordsworth as my contemporary, and I read all those people as if they were reading me. They are who I want to impress."

— Excerpt from Oral Memoirs of Christian Wiman,
Baylor University Institute for Oral History

Wiman is the author, editor, or translator of fourteen books, including Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (2024), Hammer is the Prayer: Selected Poems (2016), My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (2013), and Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (2012). He has been a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford and a visiting assistant professor of English at Northwestern, and for three years he served as Visiting Scholar at Lynchburg College in Virginia.

A former Guggenheim fellow, Wiman won the Commonwealth Prize from the English-Speaking Union and the Ambassador Book Award. He has been the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship and holds two honorary doctorates.