Christine Hume is an American poet and essayist. Christine Hume is the author of three books of poetry, Musca Domestica, Alaskaphrenia, and Shot and six prose chapbooks, ', ', Hum, ', ', a collaboration with Jeff Clark and Red: A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story. She is faculty in the Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.
Life
Hume received her BA, MFA, and PhD degrees from Penn State University, Columbia University School of the Arts, and University of Denver, respectively. She has taught at Stuyvesant High School, Illinois Wesleyan University, The School of the Art Institute in Chicago and is currently a Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University, where she has worked since 2001. Hume has written and lectured on sound poetry, audio documentary poetics, voice, and radio from a feminist perspective. From 2006-2010 she hosted an internet radio program, Poetry Radio, featuring contemporary and historic performance arts, sound poetry, audio narratives, sound art, and collaborations between writers and musicians. She has collaborated on sonic arrangements for her work with Stephen Vitiello, Gregory Whitehead, Ben Miller, and other musicians. In the last decade, Hume’s creative interests have shifted to creative nonfiction. In 2002, she was one of two Americans invited to an international festival, “Days of Poetry and Wine” in Slovenia; in 2006, she taught a poetry workshop in St. Petersburgh for Summer Literary Seminars, and in 2012 she taught a writing workshop on the walk in Lisbon for Disquiet: Dzanc Books International Literary Program.
Musca Domestica, Hume's first book of poetry and winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, was published in 2000 by Beacon Press. Her second book, Alaskaphrenia, winner of the Green Rose Award and Small Press Traffic's Best Book of 2004 Award, was published in 2004 by New Issues. Her most recent book, Shot, was published in 2010 by Counterpath Press. Her chapbook, a text image collaboration with her partner, Jeff Clark, Question Like a Face was one of "." Her prose and criticism have appeared in Harper's, Architecture and Culture, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, Disability Studies Quarterly, Rain Taxi, Chicago Review, How2, Afgabe, Constant Critic, Womens Studies Quarterly as well as three volumes of a series by Wesleyan University Press, Poets in the 21st Century. In 2019, she edited and introduced a of American Book Review.
Christine Hume’s first collection, Musca Domestica, presented a remarkably coherent set of motifs and themes that articulate a governing aesthetic. Her second book Alaskaphrenia offers readers another ambitious articulation of philosophical insight and rich meditation on human consciousness.
Chris Champanioni writes of Question Like a Face: "This is the oft-stated because of the book, the function of Hume repeatedly insisting—beginning in the preface—that we might be the cause, implicating ourselves, surely, but also suggesting that we might take up the occasion, too, for resistance and remonstration, a reason or motive for human action. And it is these nuances, this unflinching desire to get out of the reduction of right and wrong, good and bad, dualities and binaries, and to probe deeper, drill farther, reveal the horizon between settling and unsettling, the ways in which we try to find a form for these facts or how we fail to that make me stay with this book..." : "Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas famously wrote that every face says "Don't kill me"; Hume/Clark's chapbook—the title of which can be read as command or description—both bears witness to this empathetic capacity of our species and puts pressure on its idealistic shortcomings. Rather: "How many times, her face is telling." We must question for faces no longer there to be unheeded, using art and every other tool at our disposal to dereify statistics on violence, narratives bent to serve the satisfied."
