Kristen Case is a writer and an educator.

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Poetry and Essays

Kristen is the author of three poetry collections: Little Arias (New Issues, 2015), Principles of Economics (Switchback Books, 2018), and Daphne (Tupelo Press, 2025). She is the recipient of a Macdowell fellowship and a two-time winner of the Maine literary award in poetry. Her work has also appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Pleiades, The St. Ann’s Review, Brooklyn Review, Chelsea, The Iowa Review, Wave Composition, Eleven Eleven, Tinderbox, Wildness, Rust + Moth, BOAAT, The Portland Press Herald, Harvard Review, Matchbook Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly. ResistMuch, Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance, Café Review, How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, Maine Review, Carolina Quarterly, and Beloit Poetry Journal. She has published essays at LitHub, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and with Essay Press.

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Scholarship

Kristen is the author of Keeping Time: Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar (forthcoming, Milkweed Editions) and American Poetry and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House, 2011). She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau (in development, Oxford UP), William James and Literary Studies (forthcoming, Cambridge UP), Thoreau in an Age of Crisis: Uses and Abuses of An American Icon (Fink, 2021), 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the 19th Century Archive (Milkweed Editions, 2019), and Thoreau at 200: Essays and Reassessments (Cambridge UP, 2016) . She has published peer-reviewed essays on Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William and Henry James. She is the author of the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Walden and Civil Disobedience.

Teaching

Kristen has been an educator for over 20 years, with experience in elementary school, middle school, and college settlings. Currently, she is Scholarship Research and Grants Manager at The Mitchell Institute, Maine’s premier scholarship organization, and Executive Director and Lead Faculty at The Monson Seminar. Expanding access to the study of literature and the liberal arts model of education is her animating purpose.

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Kristen Case has published essays on Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William and Henry James, and is the author of the book American Poetry and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House, 2011). She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau (in development, Oxford UP), William James and Literary Studies (forthcoming, Cambridge UP), Thoreau in an Age of Crisis: Uses and Abuses of An American Icon (Fink, 2021), 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the 19th Century Archive (Milkweed Editions, 2019), and Thoreau at 200: Essays and Reassessments (Cambridge UP, 2016) .  Kristen’s first poetry collection, Little Arias was published by New Issues Press in 2015. Her second collection, Principles of Economics, published by Switchback Books, won the 2018 Gatewood Prize. She is the recipient of the Maine Literary Award in Poetry (2016 and 2020), a MacDowell Fellowship, and the UMF Trustee Professorship. She is Executive Director of the Monson Arts Seminar and Director of Thoreau’s Kalendar: A Digital Archive of the Phenological Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau. Her current book project is Keeping Time: Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar (forthcoming, Milkweed Editions). She is Scholarship Research and Grants Manager at the Mitchell Institute, Maine’s premier scholarship organization.