A.V. Christie, award-winning local poet, dies
A.V. Christie, 53, of Malvern, a Philadelphia-area poet and teacher, died of breast cancer Thursday, April 7, at the Neighborhood Health Inpatient Hospice at Chester County Hospital in West Chester.
A.V. Christie, 53, of Malvern, a Philadelphia-area poet and teacher, died of breast cancer Thursday, April 7, at the Neighborhood Health Inpatient Hospice at Chester County Hospital in West Chester.
Ms. Christie was born in Redwood City, Calif., and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Montana, and British Columbia. She was a graduate of Vassar College, where she studied with the writers Eamon Grennan and Nancy Willard, and received her master of fine arts degree from the University of Maryland, studying with the poet Stanley Plumly. She lived in Baltimore before relocating to Malvern in 1997.
Her first poetry collection, Nine Skies, won the 1996 National Poetry Series prize. Readers immediately recognized a powerful voice. The poet Henri Cole described it as "hard-bitten, luxuriant and true," and the Philadelphia-area poet Eleanor Wilner called it "diamond-faceted, elliptical." W.S. DiPiero said of her 2014 collection The Wonders that "her poems invoke and respect strangeness and make strangeness feel near."
Poet and friend Leonard Gontarek offered a poetic remembrance of Ms. Christie by e-mail: "Like the poet herself, A.V. Christie's poetry is precise, elegant and generous. In her poems she gives us a model of the universe: If we possess integrity and trust the world, truth will come through. If we know the world deeply enough, we will see the logic of happiness and sorrow. If we listen carefully, we will hear the music coaxed from the dusk and fallen magnolia flowers, the pond, the clouds, and her beloved robins. It will be the music we hear as knowledge becomes wisdom."
This is a poetry of grace and holy light.
She was a visiting writer and writer-in-residence at colleges along the Main Line and regionally, including Villanova and La Salle Universities; Bryn Mawr College; Goucher College in Baltimore; the University of Maryland, College Park; and Penn State Abington.
Ms. Christie's poems, reviews, and interviews were widely published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, the Iowa Review, Commonweal, and other venues. Her collection The Housing, published in 2004, was a cowinner of the Robert McGovern Publication Prize. Her chapbook And I Began to Entertain Doubts is to be published next month by Folded Word Press.
A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Maryland State Arts Council, Ms. Christie worked for many years as a poet in schools in Philadelphia as well as the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University. At the time of her diagnosis, she was deputy director of the Chester County Art Association.
She is survived by her daughter, Gabriella Fattibene of Malvern; her brothers, Joseph Christie of Lake Isabella, Calif., and Stuart Christie of Hong Kong; and her sister, Alix Christie of London, England. She was preceded in death by her brother, Andrew Christie, and her mother, Glennys Christie.
A memorial gathering will be held at 3 p.m. Saturday, April 16, at the Duportail House, 297 Adams Dr., Chesterbrook.
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