About Me + Publications
In 2020, she successfully completed a PhD at Cardiff University (Wales, U.K.). Her dissertation explored southern ambivalence and the adult-child voice in contemporary southern poetry by women. She is deeply interested in Southern literature, history, and culture, which informs both her research and her creative work.
In 2023, she published her first full-length collection of poems, titled The Art of Coming Undone (Black Springs Group), which includes an ekphrastic collaboration with Dutch artist Erna Kuik.
In 2026, Divergent Writers: Disability, Illness, Neurodivergence, and Ableism in Creative Writing, an anthology edited by Christie Collins and Saul Lemerond, was published by Bloomsbury Academic. A brainchild of Christie’s, Divergent Writers is the first work of its kind within the creative writing field. These topics are personal to Christie, as she continues to navigate dyslexia, ADHD, rheumatoid arthritis, and hypermobility. She remains committed to raising awareness of disability and ableism as well as advocating for disabled writers.
Presently, Christie teaches literature and creative writing at Mississippi State University, and she lives in Mississippi with her husband, Martyn, two dogs (Birdie and Winston), and two cats (Nico and Nora). Often drawing from her own life, she writes about family, memory, personal connections, the South, and folklore, and often explores the uncanny and the speculative in her work. She also enjoys working on art projects and home design projects as well as preserving and archiving family and community history.
Divergent Writers
Edited by Christie Collins & Saul Lemerond
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026
Divergent Writers is a welcome acknowledgement that 1 in 4 of us will become disabled for at least 3 months before we retire and that about twenty percent of us are neurodivergent. This book tells the important truth: we're not all the same as each other, we're each not the same as we were a few years ago, and that variety and variability is exactly what makes creative writing and the literature we produce exciting, relevant, and worthwhile for humanity. This anthology is an rousing breakthrough for a field that-thankfully-keeps evolving.
The Art of Coming Undone
Collection of poems with artwork by Erna Kuik
Black Springs Group, 2023.
The Art of Coming Undone is a feast of a collection: lushly erotic, witty, and redolent with love both lost and abiding...Collins seems to say...that only when we come undone may we find, in the loss, our creation.
Along the Diminishing Stretch of Memory
Chapbook of poems
Dancing Girl Press, 2014.
Collins's poems gift us with infectious motion, a restless sense of identity that discovers a regenerative spirit by daring to enact psychic destruction. The elegy’s grievous descent becomes a vehicle toward the creation of a vulnerable and sympathetic voice often in tension with various doubles.