Biography

Chris Green sees his work at the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center, which he has directed since July 2012, as the most important he has yet undertaken. He is a  professor, poet, activist, and administrator who love and serves Appalachia with all its many cultures and people, as well as all the many peoples of the United States and the world.

Chris grew up in Lexington, Ky., and attended the University of Kentucky (UK) where Appalachian Studies and creative writing answered his need to write poetry, know the world, and fight for justice. He went on to earn his MA in English from Appalachian State University, and his MFA in Poetry and MS in secondary education at Indiana University, where he studied the wiley ways of poetry and post-colonialism.

After working as a poet in the community, he completed his Phd on multicultural American poetry at UK. He moved to Huntington, W.Va., where for a decade where he professed English, Appalachia, and world change. While there, his monograph, The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism, won the 2009 Weatherford Award for the best non-fiction book about Appalachia. Chris also co-edited Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction, a collection of scholarly essays, and edited Coal: A Poetry Anthology, a collection of 98 poets designed for non-academic readers, a book that one reviewer concluded was “significant and lasting contribution to Appalachian literature, and maybe more importantly, to the literature of a world coming to terms with how our resources and the ways we use them transform our lives.”

His own book of poetry is called Rushlight.

In late July 2019, Chris gave a series of impassioned lectures on the history of Appalachian literature to writers at the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Ky.

He also tries to write at least one haiku a day.