Heather ChristleAssociate Professor of English and Creative Writing

Heather Christle is the author of five poetry collections: Heliopause (Wesleyan, 2015); What Is Amazing (Wesleyan, 2012); The Trees The Trees (Octopus, 2011), which won the Believer Poetry Award and was adapted into a ballet; The Difficult Farm (Octopus, 2009); and the forthcoming Paper Crown (Wesleyan, 2025).

In 2019, Christle published her first work of nonfiction, The Crying Book (Catapult), a New York Times Editor's Choice, which won the Georgia Book Award for memoir, was adapted for radio by the BBC, and has been translated into eight languages. Christle is also the author of the forthcoming In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf (Algonquin, 2025). In 2021 she was the recipient of a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in nonfiction. 

Her writing has appeared in venues including Elle, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Statesman, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry.

Christle attended Tufts University for her BA. After receiving her MFA from UMass Amherst, she spent two years as a Creative Writing Fellow at Emory. She has also taught at UT Austin, Wittenberg University, Antioch College, and Sarah Lawrence College. She returned to Emory to join the core faculty of the Creative Writing Program in 2019.