Berkley Center

Christian Wiman is a poet and senior lecturer in religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music in Yale’s Divinity School. He is the author of four books of poetry: Once In the West (2014), Every Riven Thing (2010), Hard Night (2005), and The Long Home (1998); a collection of essays, Ambition and Survival: On Becoming a Poet (2007); and a memoir, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (2013). His translations of Osip Mendelstam are collected in Stolen Air (2012). From 2003 until 2013 Wiman was the editor of Poetry magazine, the premier magazine for poetry in the English-speaking world. During that time the magazine’s circulation tripled, and it garnered two National Magazine Awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors. He is a recipient of both the Ruth Lilly and Wallace Stegner fellowships. A native of West Texas, Wiman graduated from Washington and Lee University.