Alumnus Christopher Bakken ’92 Awarded 2021-22 Fulbright

By
Nicole Saldarriaga
May 03, 2021

Poetry alumnus Christopher Bakken '92 has been granted a Fulbright award for the 2021-22 academic year. He will live out the award year in Greece, where he will be working on new projects in poetry, nonfiction, and translation as well as teaching classes at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. This is Bakken's second Fulbright award—the first took him to the University of Bucharest in Romania in 2008, where he served as a lecturer and worked on poetry and translations. 

Bakken's previous work, much of which can be found here, includes a wide range of poetry, translation, memoir, and other forms of nonfiction. His first collection of poetry, After Greece (Truman State University Press, 2001) was the recipient of the 2001 T.S. Eliot Prize, and his second collection, Goat Funeral (Sheep Meadow Press, 2007) was called "so luminous, yet so willing to be lost" by poet and former special lecturer Richard Howard (CC '51)

Subsequent work includes The Lion's Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios (Truman State University Press, 2007), for which Bakken acted as a co-translator from the Greek, and Honey, Olives, Octopus (University of California Press, 2013), a culinary memoir. Bakken's latest book of poetry, Eternity and Oranges (Pitt Poetry Series, 2016) was called "...a beautiful collection of poems: half-cryptic, half-open; half based on ancient myths, half on actual life. There's almost always Greece as the backdrop, olives and the sea but also a human drama" by the late, award-winning Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski. 

Christopher Bakken is a Frederick F. Seely Professor of English at Allegheny College and serves as Director of Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki & Thasos. He is poetry editor at Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters. His work has earned him the T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonfiction from Southwest Review, and several others. He received his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and his BA in English from University of Wisconsin–Madison. His poetry, nonfiction, reviews, and translations have appeared 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.