About Me + Publications
Christie Collins is a writer, poet, college lecturer, advocate, editor, and archivist from the American South.
Born in Western North Carolina, Christie grew up on a family farm on the outskirts of Waynesville, a small mountain town near Asheville. From a young age, her interests in writing, art, science, and history were encouraged by members of her family. Just before her 12th birthday, her family moved to Amory, Mississippi, her mother’s hometown, and thus she considers both the Blue Ridge mountains and Northeast Mississippi to be her “home.”
Christie attended Mississippi University for Women (BA) and Mississippi State University (MA), where she pursued her interests in literature and creative writing. In 2012, she moved to Baton Rouge to teach in the English Department at Louisiana State University, and she eventually began her PhD studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Christie lived in Louisiana for five years, often visiting New Orleans and enjoying the local art, culture, and cuisine. In 2014, she published a chapbook of poems, titled Along the Diminishing Stretch of Memory (Dancing Girl Press). While only in Louisiana for a few years, the experience had a significant impact on her life and her writing.
In 2017, Christie moved to the United Kingdom to continue her PhD studies in literature and creative writing at Cardiff University in Wales. While abroad, Christie came to better appreciate the impact of southern culture, literature, and history on her identity and on her writing. In 2020, she finished and successfully defended her PhD dissertation, which was comprised of a full-length collection of poems and a significant research component exploring southern ambivalence and the adult-child voice in contemporary southern poetry by women. While abroad in Wales, Christie taught courses in creative writing and English literature at Cardiff University.
In 2021, Christie moved back to Mississippi to be closer to her family and to teach at Mississippi State University, where she received her MA years ago. In 2023, she published her first full-length collection of poems, titled The Art of Coming Undone (Black Springs Group), which includes an ekphrastic collaboration with Dutch artist Erna Kuik.
In 2026, Divergent Writers, an anthology edited by Christie Collins and Saul Lemerond, was published by Bloomsbury Academic. A brainchild of Christie, Divergent Writers is the first of its kind to explore the effects of neurodivergence, disability, chronic illness, and ableism on writers and students within the creative writing field. This topic is personal and particularly important to Christie, as she navigates dyslexia, ADHD, rheumatoid arthritis, and hypermobility, among other health concerns. Christie is committed to raising awareness of disability and ableism and to continue to advocate for disabled writers.
A lifelong passion, Christie continues to be fascinated by history, ancestry, and genealogy, and is dedicated to preserving and archiving historical family documents. She is also still deeply interested in Southern literature, history, and culture, which informs both her research and her creative work.
Presently, Christie lives in Mississippi with her husband, Martyn, two dogs (Birdie and Winston), and two cats (Nico and Nora). When she’s not teaching at MSU, she enjoys reading and writing about family, folklore, the uncanny, and the speculative. She also enjoys working on art projects and home design projects, traveling to new places, and spending quality time with her family.
The Art of Coming Undone
Collection of poems with artwork by Erna Kuik
Black Springs Group, 2023.
The Art of Coming Undone is a feast of a collection: lushly erotic, witty, and redolent with love both lost and abiding...Collins seems to say...that only when we come undone may we find, in the loss, our creation.
Along the Diminishing Stretch of Memory
Chapbook of poems
Dancing Girl Press, 2014.
Collins's poems gift us with infectious motion, a restless sense of identity that discovers a regenerative spirit by daring to enact psychic destruction. The elegy’s grievous descent becomes a vehicle toward the creation of a vulnerable and sympathetic voice often in tension with various doubles.
