Christopher Shipman

Christopher Shipman earned an MFA from Louisiana State University in 2009. As a graduate student Shipman received a scholarship to attend the month long Prague Summer Writing Program, where he worked closely with poets Mark Jarman and Carol Ann Davis. He also served as poetry editor for New Delta Review and helped start the first Delta Mouth Literary Festival, now the premiere literary event of Baton Rouge every spring.

Upon graduation Shipman was awarded a fellowship to remain as a full-time instructor at LSU for two years, teaching poetry workshops, poetry survey courses, and composition. During this time Shipman became poetry editor for DIG Magazine of Baton Rouge, ran the River Writers reading series with Vincent Cellucci, and acted as publicity coordinator for LSU’s Readers and Writers program. Then, after a brief stint teaching community college Shipman found his home in New Orleans. He currently teaches creative writing and English lit to high school kids and plays drums for the New Orleans punk band The Call Girls, fronted by poet and publisher Bill Lavender.

Shipman’s poetry has been featured on Verse Daily, appears in journals such as Cimarron Review, PANK, and Salt Hill, among many others, and has been anthologized in Fuck Poems (Lavender Ink 2013) and The Mississippi River Poetry Anthology (Louisiana Literature Press 2015). Shipman was a winner of the Motion Poems Big Bridges prize in 2015. He has been a finalist for various poetry book prizes including the Eric Hoffer Award, the Akron Prize, the De Novo Prize, the Carolina Wren Poetry Prize, and others. In respect to Shipman’s first full-length collection of poetry, Human-Carrying Flight Technology (BlaveVox 2012), Larissa Szporluk says, “He writes calmly and beautifully about what reads like actual life.” In the year of his debut Shipman also saw the release of his chapbook, I Carved Your Name (Imaginary Friend Press), another chapbook coauthored with DeWitt Brinson, Super Poems (Kattywompus Press), and the collaborative poetry and art book with paintings by Benjamin Cockfield, Romeo’s Ugly Nose (Allography Press).

Since then, Shipman has published, in collaboration with Vincent Cellucci, A Ship on the Line (Unlikely Books); in collaboration with Brett Evans, The T. Rex Parade; a chapbook of short prose pieces, The Movie My Murderer Makes (The Cupboard); and Cat Poems: Wompus Tales and a Play of Despair (Kattywompus Press.) Shipman has also published reviews of books by Andrei Codrescu, Rick Lott, Patricia Smith, and Chris Tonelli, and his stage play inspired by the process and imagination of Joseph Cornell, Metaphysique D’ Ephemera has been directed by Sarah K. Jackson at Louisiana State University, by Craig Gingrich-Philbrook at Southern Illinois University, and by Nichole Nicolson at Pierce College. Look for his new book The Movie My Murderer Makes: Season II forthcoming from The Cupboard summer of 2018.