Murray State Reading Series welcomes author Christina Olson
By Dr. Carrie Jerrell | Mar 17, 2025
MURRAY, Ky. – The Murray State Reading Series, sponsored by the Department of English and Philosophy, is pleased to welcome poet and essayist Christina Olson to campus for a reading on Thursday, April 10 at 4 p.m. in the Waterfield Library Gallery. The event is free and open to the public.
Christina Olson is the author of “The Anxiety Workbook,” published by the University of Pittsburgh Press’s Pitt Poetry Series, and named the finalist for Georgia Author of the Year Award in 2024. She is also the author of the full-length collections “Terminal Human Velocity” and “Before I Came Home Naked,” as well as the chapbooks “Weird Science” and “Rook & The M.E.: A Law & Order-Inspired Narrative.” Her chapbook “The Last Mastodon,” based on her time as poet-in-residence at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California, won the 2019 Rattle Chapbook Prize.
Her poetry and creative nonfiction has appeared in more than a hundred magazines and journals including “The Atlantic,” “Brevity,” “DIAGRAM,” “Fourth Genre,” “Gastronomica,” “The Nation,” “The Normal School,” “Poetry Daily,” “Scientific American,” “Verse Daily,” “Virginia Quarterly Review” and “The Best Creative Nonfiction,” Volume Three.
She is the former poetry editor of “Midwestern Gothic” and the recipient of full fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Willapa Bay AiR. Christina is an associate professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University and a past visiting faculty member in the Murray State University low-res Master of Fine Arts program. In 2019, she joined the faculty of the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference. From 2020-2023, she served as director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit.
For more information about the Murray State Reading Series, contact Dr. Gwendolyn Paradice at gparadice@murraystate.edu or 270-809-2401.