About

Christine Stewart-Nuñez was born in Des Moines, Iowa on May 3, 1973. In 1995, she received a B.A. in English Education and with a minor in Writing at the University of Northern Iowa. After spending two years teaching at Tarsus American College in Turkey, she moved back to the States to attend graduate school at Arizona State University and received her M.A. in English in 2000. In 2007 she received her Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she was a graduate teaching assistant and a recipient of Othmer and Presidential Fellowships as well as an Academy of American Poetry Award, College of Arts & Sciences Graduate Teaching Assistant Award, and a Folsom Distinguished Dissertation Award. At UNL she studied with Ted Kooser, Hilda Raz, and Grace Bauer among other writers and scholars.

In the fall of 2007, she became as assistant professor at South Dakota State University where she teaches creative writing, literature, and composition and coordinates creative writing. She lives in Brookings with her husband Juan Abel Nuñez and son, Holden.

Stewart-Nuñez is the author of three volumes of poetry. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in a variety of magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Calyx, Arts & Letters, and North American Review. Her themes range from explorations of popular culture, inquiry into the lives of historical women, the gendered body, pregnancy/ childbirth, loss, and travel.

Based on her experiences living Turkey, Postcard on Parchment was selected by David Baker as the winner of the 2007 ABZ First Book Prize. In Postcard on Parchment (ABZ Press 2008), Stewart-Nuñez juxtaposes travelistic poems of landscape and portrait with lyrics that engage personal relationships. In both form and impulse, these poems take up questions of embodiment: In what ways do culture and gender map themselves on the flesh? What do layers of earth and architecture reveal about a landscape’s history? How do loss and betrayal inhabit texts expressed within line and image?

She is also the author of two chapbooks. The iconic image of supermodel Kate Moss is the focal point of Unbound & Branded (Finishing Line Press 2006). These ekphrastic poems, inspired by a forty-page magazine portfolio of artists responding to Moss, explore the ways media construct women’s bodies. In The Love of Unreal Things (Finishing Line Press 2005), Stewart-Nuñez explores the tensions between physical desire and spiritual calling in the life of Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth-century Italian mystic.

Stewart-Nuñez’s current projects include a new poetry manuscript, a series of creative nonfiction essays, and an anthology. Keeping Them Alive braids poems about the 1984 death of her sister, Theresa, the birth of her son, Holden, and the experiences that bridge these two events. The essays collage episodes from her travel in Turkey, Antigua, Italy, India, and Japan with childhood events and research into the generative objects that link them. She is collaborating with Laura Madeline Wiseman on Women Write Resistance, an anthology of emerging and established American women poets who resist violence against women in their work.