Christian Wiman is an American poet and editor. He was born (1966) and raised in West Texas and is a graduate of Washington and Lee University. He has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics. Since 2003, he has been editor of the oldest and most prestigious American magazine of verse, Poetry .
His first book of poetry, The Long Home, won the prestigious Nicholas Roerich Prize. His most recent book, reviewed by The New York Times Sunday Book Review, is Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) "a collection of personal essays and critical prose on a wide range of subjects: reading Paradise Lost in Guatemala, recalling violent episodes from the poet's youth, traveling in Africa with an eccentric father, as well as a series of penetrating essays on poets, poetry, and poetry's place in our lives. The book concludes with a portrait of Wiman's diagnosis with a rare cancer, and a clear-eyed declaration of what it means ... for an artist and a person ... to have faith in the face of death."
His poems, criticism, and personal essays appear widely in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. Clive James describes Wiman’s poems as being “insistent on being read aloud, in a way that so much from America is determined not to be. His rhymes and line-turnovers are all carefully placed to intensify the speech rhythms, making everything dramatic: not shoutingly so, but with a steady voice that tells an ideal story every time.” Wiman lives in Chicago.