Christianne Balk

Christianne Balk (born 1953) is an American poet.

Life
Balk graduated with honors in biology from Grinnell College and taught at the University of British Columbia. Her work has appeared in Pequod, Crazy Horse, Sulfur, The Centennial review The Missouri Review, Sonora Review, Prairie Schooner Harper's, and The New Yorker. She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband and daughter.

Writing
[[Andy Brumer: "Bindweed...shows some of the awkwardness and tentativeness characteristic of younger poets, but it also introduces an artist resonant with talent. Ms. Balk writes poems that stay close to nature, tapping the rhythms of the changing seasons for metaphors of the human life cycle and rounding out nature's powerful processes with the human qualities of joy, loss and grief."

Ploughshares: "Among the many pleasures of Christianne Balk’s Desiring Flight, two stand out. First, Balk has – as she showed in her Walt Whitman Award–winning Bindweed – a biologist’s precise knowledge of the natural world, and consequently her poems convey, at times, the comforting authority of a field guide. But there is much more than that: It is as if Balk has held all the objects of her world, turned them over, and spoken their names until they have transcended the scientific into the poetic."

Awards

 * 1985 Walt Whitman Award
 * 1994 Verna Emory Award
 * Alaska Council on the Arts travel grant