The Murray State Reading Series, sponsored by the Department of English and Philosophy, is pleased to welcome poet and essayist Christina Olson to campus for a reading on Thursday, April 10 at 4:00pm in Waterfield Library Gallery. The event is free and open to the public.

Christina Olson is the author of The Anxiety Workbook, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press’s Pitt Poetry Series, and named the finalist for Georgia Author of the Year Award in 2024. She is also the author of the full-length collections Terminal Human Velocity and Before I Came Home Naked as well as the chapbooks Weird Science and Rook & The M.E.: A Law & Order-Inspired Narrative. Her chapbook The Last Mastodon, based on her time as poet-in-residence at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California, won the 2019 Rattle Chapbook Prize.

Her poetry & creative nonfiction has appeared in more than a hundred magazines & journals, including The Atlantic, Brevity, DIAGRAM, Fourth Genre, Gastronomica, The Nation, The Normal School, Poetry Daily, Scientific American, Verse Daily, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume Three.

She is the former poetry editor of Midwestern Gothic and the recipient of full fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Willapa Bay AiR. Christina is an associate professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University and a past visiting faculty member in the Murray State University low-res MFA program. In 2019, she joined the faculty of the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference. From 2020-2023, she served as director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit.

For more information about the Murray State Reading Series, contact Dr. Gwendolyn Paradice at gparadice@murraystate.edu or 270-809-2401.