Christina Davis
Christina Davis has served as Curator since 2008 and has received the Dean's Distinction and 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, and, more recently, has received a Mellon Foundation Public Knowledge Grant for the creation of The Library of Voices (2025-2027). She has also established the WPR Creative Fellowship program, the Close Listening curriculum, the first poetry-related January Intensives at Harvard, and a wide range of public programming series including the Oral History Initiative, Reel Time, Boston Originals, and the Vocarium Reading Series.
With funds from the T. S. Eliot Foundation, she has founded the annual Eliot Memorial Reading, featuring such speakers as Fred Moten, Anne Waldman, Claudia Rankine, and Cecilia Vicuna. 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 Anne Sexton & Her Kind archive, Ashbery Reading Library, and the Galway Kinnell recordings, 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 book-in-progress Small Evers, and with composer Jacek Smolicki the multimedia pieces T/hither (2026) and DISCORD, MA. Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in such journals as the American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, Interim, Jubilat, Los Angeles Review, The Nation, New Republic, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, and Poetry Magazine. Her work has also been set to music by such composers as Gene Biringer. 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 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 to championing 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....