Christine Hume

A photo of Christine Hume

Professor

English Language and Literature

612K Pray-Harrold

chume@emich.edu

Education

  • MFA, Columbia University
  • Ph.D., University of Denver

Interests and Expertise

Christine Hume is the author of The Saturation Project (Solid Objects, 2019), a lyric memoir in the form of three interlinked essays, as well as three books of poetry and many chapbooks, most recently a collaboration with Jeff Clark, Question Like a Face (Image Text Ithaca), a Brooklyn Rail Best Nonfiction Book of 2017, and Red: A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story (PANK Books, 2020).

Recently she curated and introduced a special #MeToo focus of American Book Review. New literary essays on gender and police brutality, weather, sex offenders, color, reading, and the nylon riots can be found in Conjunctions, The Spectacle, CURA: a Literary Magazine of Art and Action, Architecture and Culture,PANK,Journal of Narrative Theory, and Disabilities Studies Quarterly. Her poetry has been anthologized widely, most recently in Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement (Wesleyan University Press, 2018).  And some of her sonic work has published, installed and performed in galleries, universities, on numerous radio programs, and in journals such as The Volta, Beyond Criticism: The Bee, TextSound, and Women Studies Quarterly.

She has taught workshops and seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia for Summer Literary Seminars and in Lisbon, Portugal for Dzanc Books International Literary Program, as well as several Academic Service Learning classes, at the undergraduate and graduate level, at EMU. She collaboratively teaches her class Collaboration and Community Projects with Linette Lao's Mixed Media class and her Chromopoetics Workshop with Chris Hyndman's Color Theory class.

Special Interests
  • audio art and sound poetry
  • literary radio
  • lyric essays
  • experimental nonfiction
  • documentary poetics
  • literary activism
  • ekphrasis
  • hybrid prose and poetry

Courses

  • Text and Image
  • Chromopoetics
  • Essay as Form
  • The Lyric Essay
  • Sound Poetry
  • First Books
  • The Walk
  • (Re)figuring Voice
  • The Animal and the Machine
  • Transgenre Writing
  • Literature of the Plague
  • Literary Hoaxes and Personae
  • Steal this Poem: Contemporary Collage
  • Procedural Arts: Poetry and Painting (cross-listed in ART)
  • Collaboration and Community Projects
  • Community Outreach for Creative Writers

Publications and Presentations

Books
  • The Saturation Project (Solid Objects, 2019)
  • Shot (Counterpath Press, 2010)
  • Alaskaphrenia (New Issues, 2004), winner of the Green Rose Award and Small Press Traffic’s 2005 Best Book of the Year Award
  • Musca Domestica (Beacon Press, 2000), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize
Chapbooks
  • Red: A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story (PANK Books, 2020)
  • Question Like a Face (Image Text Ithaca, 2017)
  • Atalanta: an Anatomy (Essay Press, 2016)
  • Hum (Dikembe Press, 2013)
  • Ventifacts (Omnidawn, 2012)
  • Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008)

 Some of her critical work is featured in Extending the Document: Source Material and the Lyric Imagination in Contemporary Poetry,ed. David Ray Vance (Wesleyan); Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, ed. Joshua Marie Wilkinson, (University of Michigan Press), Case on the Line, ed. Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee, (University of Iowa) Cartographies of the In-between, ed. Peter Cockelbergh  (Litteraria Pragensi/ Philosophy Faculty of Charles University, Prague), and three volumes of Poets in the 21st Century, ed. Claudia Rankine (Wesleyan UP).