Christian Hawkey



Christian Hawkey (born 1969, in Pine Island, Florida) is an American poet.

Life and work
Christian Hawkey graduated from University of Massachusetts Amherst.

He taught at University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he edited jubilat. He is an associate professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He teaches in the English department, and the Writing for Publication, Performance, and Media Program.

He is author of three books of poetry: The Book of Funnels (Winner of the 2006 Kate Tufts Discovery Award), HourHour (published by Delirium Press in 2005), Citizen Of (released by Wave Books in 2007); and has been featured in Conjunctions, Volt, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, Crowd, BOMB, Chicago Review, Best American Poetry, Conduit, and PEN America. His work has recently been translated into German Slovene, French, and Portuguese; and he translates several contemporary German poets including Daniel Falb, Sabine Scho and Steffen Popp, and Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger.

Writing
Cold Front: "He has the perfect hipster sense of language, the way to turn the phrase and turn the image so that it continually unfolds along its opposite edge, bringing the idea back onto itself before moving forward again. He can flip his tonal register at any moment by sliding quickly along a new linguistic thread.  His writing is not narrative or linear, but rather (dare I say it), rhizomatic—each phrase, clause and word offering a new branch of exploration."

Recognition
He has received awards from the Poetry Fund and the Academy of American Poets, and was the recipient of the Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award in 2006. In 2008, he was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow. In the Summer of 2010, Hawkey holds the Picador Guest Professorship for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany.