Christian Wiman

Christian Wiman earned a bachelor’s degree from Washington and Lee University and studied at Stanford University on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. He 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.

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. Wiman is a return participant in the Beall Poetry Festival, having read his poetry at Baylor in 2014.