Christian Campbell

Christian Campbell is Assistant Professor of English and Faculty, MA in the Field of Creative Writing Program at the University of Toronto. He has also been a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Literatures in English and the Centre for Gender Studies, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. Dr. Campbell writes about a range of expressive cultures, including literature, music, visual art and performance originating from and moving between the Caribbean, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. His widely acclaimed first book, Running the Dusk (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize (UK) and was a finalist for the Forward Prize for the Best First Collection (UK) and the Cave Canem Poetry Prize (US) among many other awards. Running the Dusk was recently translated into Spanish and published in Cuba as Correr el Crepúsculo (Ediciones Santiago). His work has been published, featured or reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, Small Axe, Callaloo, The Financial Times, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature and elsewhere. A Duke PhD, Campbell studied at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and teaches at the University of Toronto. Campbell’s recent work includes a series of lyric essays on Jean-Michel Basquiat and a scholarly manuscript entitled Dehistories: Poetry and Freedom in the Black Diaspora.

His current research includes revising a book on poetry and diaspora, and completing a collection of essays that approaches criticism as an art form through poetic and autobiographical analysis of literature, visual art, sports, performance, travel and cultural politics. A section of this collection will be devoted to the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In the last few years, Campbell has been commissioned to write essays for Basquiat exhibits in Canada (Art Gallery of Ontario), the US (Nahmad Contemporary) and the UK (Barbican Art Gallery), and received the Art Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries.