Bright Mirror

Christine Perrin, MFA, is the Director of Writing at Messiah College and has taught literature and creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, with Gordon College’s Orvieto Program, through the Pennsylvania Arts Council to students of all ages, and at the local classical school where her children attended. She consults with classical schools in curriculum development and faculty development in poetry and writing, and speaks regularly at the CiRCE Institute as well as the Society for Classical Learning conferences. She is a two-time recipient of the PA Arts Council Artists Fellowship and a Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Fellowship. Her own work appears in various journals, including The New England Review, Image, TriQuarterly, Blackbird, Christianity and Literature, and The Cresset. Christine is the series editor for the Writing & Rhetoric series and the author of The Art of Poetry, a textbook for middle to high school students, all published by Classical Academic Press. She attended Johns Hopkins as an undergraduate student and earned her MFA from the University of Maryland.

As a writer, she enjoys tracing the genealogical relationship of one writer to another and sees writing as the highest form of reading. She is interested in the conversation that the philosopher Gadamer thought we were meant to have with literature—one that causes us to live differently. He describes poetry as “a nearness.” She has learned a great deal from her students—conversation partners. Another influential polymath is the literary critic George Steiner, who insists that as readers we are here to serve the text, to dialogue with the writer, and to respond to art with art, to the extent that we are able. Some of her favorite work to do is with students writing a senior thesis, a yearlong writing project. Christine and her husband, Christopher, are the parents of three grown children: Zoë, Elle, and Noah.