Tender the Maker

"Again and again in Christina Hutchins’s exquisite Tender the Maker, poems startle us into awareness of the overlooked, the nearly always invisible (such as a library’s unused dictionary), and the marvelous, those aspects of life that come under the rubric of ‘mystery,’ in all senses of the word. Hutchins combines a pitch-perfect and precise lyricism with a postmodern sensibility of language’s materiality.”
—Cynthia Hogue, judge for the 2015 May Swenson Poetry Award


The May Swenson Poetry Award is an annual competition named for May Swenson, one of America’s most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in her hometown of Logan, Utah.

A well-published poet, Christina Hutchins holds degrees from University of California at Davis, Harvard University, and Graduate Theological Union. She currently teaches Masters’ courses in poetry and philosophy at Berkeley's Pacific School of Religion, and has worked as a biochemist and a Congregational (UCC) minister. She has previously published three volumes of poetry,The Stranger Dissolves, Radiantly We Inhabit the Air, and Collecting Light, as well as contributions to several anthologies. Her literary awards include The Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, The National Poetry Review’s Finch Prize, two Barbara Deming Awards, and the James Phelan Poetry Prize, and her poems appear in periodicals such asThe New Republic, Antioch Review, Salmagundi, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner,and Women’s Review of Books. She lives in Albany, CA, where she serves as the city's first Poet Laureate.