Yvette Christiansë is a poet, novelist, and scholar. Her poetry, prose and scholarly writings have been publised in the United States, South Africa, Australia, Canada, Holland and France. She is the author of two books of poetry
Castaway (Duke 1999),
Imprendehora (
Kwela Books/Snail Press 2009) and the novel
Unconfessed published in the US by Other Press (2006), in South Africa by Kwela Books (2007) and in Holland by Querido (2007). Her earlier poetry was published in Australia in a shared volume titled
Faultlines: Three Poets (Round Table Press 1991). She was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was raised in that city, Cape Town, and Mbabane, Swaziland until her family moved to Australia to escape apartheid. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Sydney.
Castaway was nominated for the PEN International prize in 2001.
Unconfessed was a finalist for the Hemingway/PEN Prize for first fiction and recipient of a 2007 ForeWord Magazine BEA Award. It was also shortlisted for the University of Johannesburg Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2008. It received four starred reviews(from
Kirkus Reviews,
Publishers Weekly,
Library Journal, and
People Magazine).
Yvette Christiansë now lives in New York City where she teaches African American and postcolonial literatures, as well as poetics, at Fordham University. She has also been a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Duke University's John Hope Franklin Center, and Barnard College's Africana Studies Program, and has taught in Princeton University's Center for Creative and Performing Arts. She has also been a National Research Council Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand and a visiting writer at the University of Cape Town.
She is represented by the Markson Toma Agency.
