Christina Hutchins

Christina Hutchins

Christina Hutchins teaches philosophy and poetry to graduate students at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. Her poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, and her academic essays have been published in volumes by Ashgate, Columbia University Press, and State University Press of New York. She is the author of two chapbooks, Collecting Light (Acacia Books, 1999), and Radiantly We Inhabit the Air (Seven Kitchens Press, 2011), which won a Robin Becker Prize. Her literary awards include the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, the National Poetry Review Finch Prize, a James D. Phelan Literary Award, and two Barbara Deming Poetry Awards. She lives in Albany, California, where she serves as the city’s first poet laureate.

The Stranger Dissolves

“Christina Hutchins’ The Stranger Dissolves is an exquisite debut volume. This superb collection is elegant, impassioned, and consistently wise in its reckonings. Few poets so carefully embody the mind’s oscillations during reflection, and the beauty of Christina Hutchins’ poems is simply beyond measure. More than any first collection I know, The Stranger Dissolves melds both mind (intelligence and thought) and heart with a startling complexity, intricacy, and intimacy. This is a volume to keep at one’s bedside.”
— David St. John

The Stranger Dissolves is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. The winning title will be announced in June.

The Stranger Dissolves is a finalist for the 2012 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, presented by the Publishing Triangle.

Read poems from The Stranger Dissolves by Christina Hutchins.

Read a review of The Stranger Dissolves by Marcus Myers, which appeared in newpages.

Read Christina’s poems “The Dead” and “The Beak & the Body Entire,” which appeared in the new online journal Clade Song.

Read Christina’s poem “The Poet to Her Poem” in Anderbo.

Read Christina’s poem “I Met a Silence,” which appeared in the July 2011 issue of Poetry Flash.

Read about Christina’s new chapbook, Radiantly We Inhabit the Air. Number Five in the Robin Becker Chapbook Series, it was selected by Eloise Klein Healy, and published in January 2011.

Read Christina’s poem “Into Your Pocket,” poem of the week for April 21, 2010, in The Missouri Review; a podcast of “Interregnum” also appeared in The Missouri Review.

Read Kirsten Jones Neff’s interview with Christina in the Marin Poetry Newsletter Quarterly Newsletter, December 2010.

Read about Christina, the City of Albany’s First Poet Laureate.

Visit our online bookshop to purchase titles.