Poet Lore and The Writer’s Center present a FREE virtual chat about the craft of poetry! We’re joined by Heather Christle to discuss her new collection, Paper Crown. Heather is in conversation with Emily Holland, poet and editor of Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal.
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Heather Christle is the author of five poetry collections and two works of nonfiction. Her latest book of poems is Paper Crown (Wesleyan, 2025) and previous volumes include Heliopause (Wesleyan, 2015); What is Amazing (Wesleyan, 2012); The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009); and The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), which won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award and was adapted into a ballet. Her nonfiction books are In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf (Algonquin Books, 2025) and The Crying Book (Catapult, 2019), which was a national bestseller and winner of the Georgia Book Award for memoir. Her writing has appeared in publications including The Believer, Elle, The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Yorker, and Poetry.
Christle attended Tufts University for her BA and received her MFA from UMass Amherst. She served as the Creative Writing Fellow at Emory from 2009–2011 and has taught at the University of Texas-Austin, Wittenberg University, Antioch College, and Sarah Lawrence College. She joined the core faculty of Emory’s Creative Writing Program in 2019, where she is now an Associate Professor.
About the Book
First poetry collection in a decade from acclaimed author of The Crying Book
Since Heather Christle published her last poetry collection a decade ago, her nonfiction works The Crying Book and In the Rhododendrons have found her readers around the world. Paper Crown marks Christle’s exuberant return to her home genre, in which she combines the imagination of her earliest poetry with the personal elements of her more recent prose. These poems conjure moments when the world’s events (a child’s words, early twentieth-century predictions of drone warfare, dinner with friends) align themselves with the odd logic of dreams and serendipity. With tenderness and verve, honesty and curiosity, Paper Crown invites readers to look up from its pages and recognize that the day going on around them could very well be its own poem.
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