About

Born into a military family and constitutionally restless, Christine Hume moved over 25 times in the U.S. and Europe before landing in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Since 2001, she’s taught at Eastern Michigan University, where she’s part of the Creative Writing program and the College in Prison program (at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility). She earned an MFA from Columbia University in 1993 and a PhD from University of Denver in 2000. After publishing three books of poetry—Musca Domestica (Barnard New Women Poets Prize), Alaskaphrenia (The Green Rose Award, and SPD’s Best Book of the Year), and Shot, her writing evolved into prose forms, especially documentary, experimental, and lyric approaches to the essay. Her essays have been published and reviewed in Architecture and Culture, The Boston Review, Conjunctions, Contemporary Collage, Disabilities Studies Quarterly, Electric Literature, Feminist Review, Full Stop, Harper’s, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney’s, New York Times Book Review and many anthologies.

She is a writer with a strong interest in the intersections between gender-based violence, reproductive justice, and feminist art. Hume is the recipient of a 2025-2026 Huntington Library Fellowship, where she researched Joanne Leonard’s Post-Journal series in the context of obstetric imagery and the criminalization of pregnancy. All the Women I Know, her collaborative text image book, with photographer Laura Larson, is an archive of women in the act of resistance (Counterpath & np:, 2026).  Early excerpts of work can be found in The Feminist Review, The Hopkins Review, Ninth Letter, Denver Quarterly (winner of the John Williams Prize for Prose), CRAFT (Hybrid Contest winner), and Seneca Review, Three Fold, Tupelo Quaterly, and featured in MacDowell’s Conversation About Social Justice, along with an experimental performance of the work, hosted at The Hoosac Institute.

Everything I Never Wanted to Know (Ohio State University Press, Essays in the 21st Century Series, 2023), her fifth book, explores two hated subjects in America, sex offenders and women’s bodies in “a dauntless and harrowing indictment of patriarchal violence,” according to Publishers Weekly.

The New York Times calls her previous book, a triptych on girlhood, Saturation Project (Solid Objects, 2021), “a richly meditative lyric memoir…that arrives with the force of a hurricane.” She has also published many chapbooks, most recently a collaboration with Jeff Clark, Question Like a Face (Image Text Ithaca, 2017), one of Brooklyn Rail’s Best Nonfiction Books of the year, and A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story ([PANK] Books, 2020).

Hume has taught visiting workshops and given talks on Sound Poetry, The Walk: Artistic Form and Generative Practice, Chromopoetics, Text and Image, Publishing, Teaching Poetry, (Re)Figuring Voice, Literary Activism, and Literary Hybridity. She participated in the international festival, “Days of Poetry and Wine” in Slovenia; taught workshops in St. Petersburg for Summer Literary Seminars; and in Lisbon, Portugal for Dzanc Books International Literary Program. She has received residencies from Ragdale in IL, Wildacres in NC, Fundacion Valaparaiso in Spain; the Wurlizter Foundation in Taos, New Mexico; MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire; and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and she has been an Image Text Ithaca Fellow at Ithaca College.

She is co-editor, with Anna Maria Hong, of Traversals: A Folio on Walking for The Hopkins Review (2023), featuring 28 writers, in print and digital versions, and an introduction with seven writing and walking prompts. As an editor, she has also curated and introduced two special issues of American Book Review, on #MeToo (2019) and on Girlhood (2021). Critical essays on contemporary poetics and poets such as Anne Carson, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, and Tracie Morris have been published by Wesleyan UP, University of Michigan Press, University of Iowa, University of Chicago Press, Litteraria Pragensi, and journals such as Contemporary Literature.