Christina Davis
Christina Davis has served as the Curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room since 2008 and has received the Dean's Distinction and is a two-time recipient of the Dean's Impact Award for her work.
During her curatorship, she has worked to expand (and re-imagine) public access to the Poetry Room's archives, events, and resources. She has spearheaded the creation of such popular digital interfaces as the Listening Booth and the Poetry Room's YouTube Channel. She has also established the WPR Creative Fellowship program, the audio-seminars curriculum, the first poetry-related January Intensives, and a wide range of public programming series including the Oral History Initiative, Reel Time, Boston Originals, A Provocation, and the Vocarium Reading Series. With funds from the T. S. Eliot Foundation, she has founded the annual Eliot Memorial Reading, with such speakers as Fred Moten and Claudia Rankine. More recently, she has renewed the Poetry Room's role as a record producer, through an innovative partnership with Fonograf Editions (featuring releases of LPs by Audre Lorde and John Ashbery).
In addition, she has been honored to oversee such donations as the John Ashbery Reading Library, the Anne Sexton & Her Kind archive, the Galway Kinnell sound recordings, and the notebooks of Fanny Howe, and has secured and stewarded several significant grants that have enabled the Poetry Room to catalog the comprehensive recording collection of sound pioneer Frederick C. Packard, Jr., and to discover previously uncataloged recordings by John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Ralph Ellison.
She is the award-winning author of An Ethic (Nightboat, 2013), Forth A Raven (Alice James, 2006), and the forthcoming chapbook Neighborn. Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in such journals as the American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, Jubilat, The Nation, The New Republic, Paris Review, and Poetry Magazine. She is the recipient of residencies from the Bellagio Center, the Dora Maar House, the Inside-Out Museum (Beijing, China), the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the American Academy in Rome.
Throughout her 20-year career (at Harvard and such organizations as Poets House, New York University, and Teachers & Writers Collaborative), Davis has steadfastly dedicated herself to the service of writers (and literature) and to supporting and sustaining artistic communities. She is a graduate of Oxford University and the University of Pennsylvania, and is grateful for the opportunity to continue to learn....