CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN

Christopher Bakken is the author of the culinary memoir, Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table, and three books of poetry, Eternity & Oranges, Goat Funeral, and After Greece. He also co-translated The Lions’ Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios. Bakken is a Professor of English at Allegheny College and he serves as Director of Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki & Thasos. He is poetry editor at Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters.

He has twice served as a Fulbright Scholar: in 2021-22 at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, and in 2008 at the University of Bucharest, Romania. His work has earned him the T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonfiction from Southwest Review, the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, the Texas Institute of Letters’ Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry, the Collins Prize from Birmingham Poetry Review, and residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the International Writers’ and Translators’ Center of Rhodes.

He received his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, his M.F.A. in Poetry from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and his B.A. in English from University of Wisconsin–Madison. His poetry, nonfiction, reviews, and translations have appeared widely in the United States and abroad, in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Wall Street Journal, New England Review, The Hudson Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.