Christine Hemp approaches communication skills as both utterly crucial and grounded in delight. She generates positive change and innovation in many disparate cultures such as the military, law enforcement, private security, education, the Episcopal church, and corporations, to name a few.   

Christine is an author, poet, musician, speaker, and creator of some unique curriculum that has brought rave reviews and has generated groundbreaking change within organizations that have found themselves “stuck.” Having taught at Harvard University, University of New Mexico, and most recently the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival, Christine also brings a creative, fresh approach to the business world. She is currently a speaker for Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau with her groundbreaking talk called "From Homer to #hashtags: Our changing Language."

She has aired her poems and essays on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. Her essay about sending a poem of hers into space on a NASA rocket won her a First Place Northwest Society of Professional Journalism Award. Hemp’s work has appeared in such publications as the Iowa Review, Harvard Magazine, Boston Review, ZYZZYVA, Christian Science Monitor, Maine Times, the Drunken Boat, and in anthologies by Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Orchard Press. Her poetry chapbook “That Fall” was selected for the New Women’s Voices Series at Finishing Line Press and her brand new memoir, Wild Ride Home, has garnered glowing reviews.

Her awards include a Harvard University Conway Award for Teaching Writing, a Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship, two Barbara Deming/Money for Women grants, the Donald Murray Award at UC Davis, a fellowship for a residency at Vermont Studio Center, First Runner-Up in the Iowa Award for Literary Non-Fiction and the Paula Jones Gardiner Award for Poetry at Floating Bridge Press. 

“Connecting Chord,” Hemp’s program with police officers and youth-at-risk, began in 2000 when she spent a week in England with Metropolitan Police officers and youth offenders in the highest crime-rate borough of London – using poetry as a tool for crime prevention. Hemp received a plaque from the English Poetry Society; the Brixton Chief of Police called her program a “milestone event.”  

She earned her B.A. in Humanities from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon; she holds a Masters degree in English from Middlebury College in Vermont with study at Lincoln College, Oxford, England. She currently teaches at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival and Hugo House, Seattle.  She lives in Port Townsend, Washington.