Next Reader

Photo Credit: James Cribbins

Christian Wessels

Welles-Brown Room, Rush Rhees Library

September 23, 2026, 5:00 PM

Christian Wessels is a poet and critic. He is the author of Who Follow the Gleam (University of Massachusetts Press), winner of the 2025 Juniper Prize in Poetry. His poetry has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, and Conjunctions, among other such journals; his scholarship and criticism has appeared in Literary Imagination, Middle Eastern Literatures, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Stadler Center for Poetry. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Rochester, from which he received his PhD in English. He splits his time between Rochester and the Black Forest, Germany.