News & Interviews

▪︎ REVIEWS
▪︎ NEWS & INTERVIEWS
▪︎ EVENTS & APPEARANCES
▪︎ PRESS KIT

Restless Messengers: Poetry in Review | “Christina Pugh, Ghosts and the Overplus” by Nicholas Skaldetvind. December 30, 2025.

“Christina Pugh proposes lyric as a mode of cognition: a haunted, sonorous, and echoing form of knowing in which poetic form, critical inquiry, and temporal sensitivity become inseparable acts of listening. ‘Poetry exploits both syntax and sonority. What is under the spotlight, what is foregrounded, what is backgrounded? Or what is virtual?’ So asks the author in her compelling, insistently ambivalent collection of essays, Ghosts and the Overplus: Reading Poetry in the Twenty-First Century, a book that quietly resists the false binary between poetic practice and critical inquiry. . . . This collection renews the reality of what has been done in the poetry of the past, and thereby points to what is possible in contemporary poetry.”

Poetry International | “The Right Hand” reviewed by Richard Holinger. 2025.

“Christina Pugh’s new book of poetry, The Right Hand: Poems, might be labelled as well a collection of Zen koans, so compressed and taut the language and syntax of every line and stanza. Organized into two parts, ‘Into the Skin’ and ‘L’Incontro: The Meeting,’ and full of disparate themes such as piercing and weaving, the yin and yang of opposites nevertheless meld together to cohere into one body (in every sense of the word).”

New Mexico Daily Lobo | “REVIEW: ‘To yield is a power:’ Christina Pugh and the poetics of ‘Revelation’” by Nicholas Skaldetvind. October 20, 2025.

“Reading Pugh, I kept returning to French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s idea that ‘to read poetry is essentially to daydream.’ The daydream, he says, joins reality and imagination into one deep current. In The Right Hand, that current runs through each poem, seemingly breathing the ache of revelation into ordinary matter. ‘Consent is a power. To yield is a power. I might even say: to yearn is a power,’ Pugh writes, her syntax moving like prayer, widening the space between submission and strength until they become indistinguishable.”

Third Coast Review | “Review: Christina Pugh’s Latest Poetry Collection, The Right Hand” by Carrie McGrath. June 30, 2025.

“[T]he latest poetry collection by Christina Pugh, possesses abstraction dancing with tradition, faith with the mystical, form that examines line and white space with the material body. Bravery exists within these pages sensing an indefinable quality amid an intense clarity in discussing pain within the body. The collection possesses deep truths with an oracle-like energy commingled with mystical meditations. The cover of the book echoes these truths and sentiments as the Bernini sculpture Ecstasy of St. Teresa leads the reader inward. The ecstasy and the Christian mysticism St. Teresa of Avila wrote about in multiple autobiographies is present (even omnipresent) within the two poems that make up this collection.”

Stories from atLAS | University of Illinois, Chicago's Liberal Arts and Sciences | Award-Winning LAS Professor and Poet Christina Pugh Discovers Inspiration Everywhere. Novermber 26, 2024.

UIC Today | “Professor Christina Pugh named Distinguished Scholar for 2023.” April 17, 2024.

Professor Christina Pugh has been named a Distinguished Scholar for 2023. She is one of five University of Illinois Chicago faculty members recognized for demonstrating outstanding achievements in her field.

SparkTalks: Christina Pugh | University of Illinois Chicago | Reading from Ghosts and the Overplus. April 3, 2024.

Igniting the thoughts and solutions of influential UIC changemakers to inspire and create a better world.

The Writer’s Center and Poet Lore | Virtual Reading with Poets Jodie Hollander & Christina Pugh. June 7, 2023.

Poets Jodie Hollander (Nocturne) and Christina Pugh (Stardust Media) joined Zach Powers, artistic director of The Writer’s Center and Poet Lore, for a virtual reading from their latest collections. June 7, 2023.

The Kenyon Review | “On Stardust Media by Christina Pugh” by Peter Campion. May 28, 2021.

“The poems in Stardust Media are major works by a major poet. Their virtuoso technique enlivens the reader’s sense of just how complex and rich the world may be, even as the poems strive toward their fundamental, bedrock motive—to preserve and transmit the imprint of the human.”

Winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Press: Stardust Media

Chicago Review of Books | “The Best Poetry Books of 2017” by Adam Morgan. December 7, 2017.

“In Perception, Christina Pugh turns her eye to everyday objects—like flowers, shop signs, and wallpaper—and unveils layer after layer of meaning and memory. It is a striking, poignant reminder of how rarely we see the depth of the world around us.”

2008 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award | “Timothy Donnelly on Christina Pugh.”

Christina Pugh’s poem “I and Thou,” from Grains of the Voice, won the 2008 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, for a poem on a humanitarian theme, from the Poetry Society of America.  Timothy Donnelly was the judge.

Poetry Northwest | “Christina Pugh: ‘Sebald’s Dream Props.’” October 15, 2007.

Read Christina Pugh’s poem “Sebald’s Dream Props,” from Restoration, along with her discussion of the poem.