Christina Pugh

Christina Pugh is a poet and literary critic.  She is the author of seven books, including two books published in 2024: a book of essays titled Ghosts and the Overplus: Reading Poetry in the Twenty-First Century (University of Michigan Press “Poets on Poetry” series, 2024) and The Right Hand (Tupelo Press, 2024), a book of poems that was a recent finalist for the National Poetry Series, and which she completed as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome.

Pugh’s fifth book of poems, Stardust Media, was awarded the Juniper Prize for Poetry (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020).  Her other books of poetry include Perception (Four Way Books, 2017), which Chicago Review of Books named one of the top poetry books of 2017; Grains of the Voice (Northwestern University Press, 2013); Restoration (Northwestern University Press, 2008); and Rotary (Word Press, 2004), which was awarded the Word Press First Book Prize.  Pugh’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Yale Review, and in more than ten anthologies, including Poetry 180 (Random House, 2003) and The Eloquent Poem (Persea Books, 2019).  Pugh’s numerous essays and articles have explored the lyric tradition in modern and contemporary poems, the role of graphics and sound in current Emily Dickinson studies, and the poetics of ekphrasis (poetry about visual art).  Pugh’s articles have appeared in American Poetry Review, Twentieth Century Literature, The New Dickinson Studies, Literary Imagination, Poetry, The Cambridge Companion to Poetry since 1945, and other publications.

Pugh’s work has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award (for poetry treating a humanitarian theme), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from Poetry magazine, a fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council, and the Grolier Poetry Prize.  She has been awarded residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), the Ragdale Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  From 2013–2020, she was Consulting Editor for Poetry magazine and appeared regularly on The Poetry Magazine Podcast.

She is currently Professor of English in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she has received UIC’s Graduate Mentoring Award, a Teaching Recognition Program Award, a UIC Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, and an Award for Creative Activities.  She was also recently named UIC’s Distinguished Scholar of the Year in Humanities, Arts, Design, and Architecture.  She lives in Evanston, Illinois.