About Christianne

Christianne Balk grew up in Woodstock, New York. After studying biology at Grinnell College, she received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. In 1990 she moved to Seattle with her family, where she now writes and teaches.

Christianne’s collections of poetry are The Holding Hours (University of Washington Press), Desiring Flight (Purdue University Press), and Bindweed (Macmillan). Honors include the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Verna Emery Poetry Prize from Purdue University, and grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the Seattle Arts Council.

Her writing appears in The Atlantic Monthly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cirque, Switched-on Gutenberg, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Alhambra Poetry Calendar, and other journals and anthologies. In October 2013, Peregrine Literary Journal awarded her the annual Pat Schneider Poetry Award for her poem “John Muir’s Wild Silk Moth.” In 2009 she received Prairie Schooner’s Annual Strousse Award for her poems. 

Over the years she’s led creative writing workshops through Artists-in-the-schools, Washington State Arts Council, University of Washington Extension, Centrum/ Port Townsend Writers Conference, University of Alaska-Fairbanks, and University of Iowa.

Christianne enjoys working with other writers of all ages and abilities and is a generative writing facilitator certified with Amherst Writers and Artists. Please contact her via the Contact page on this website.