Lonely Christopher

Who is Lonely Christopher?

Lonely Christopher is an American writer of poetry, prose, and theatre.

He shares a birthday with poets Frank O'Hara and Dorothea Lasky.

Lonely Christopher attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He was accepted into the photography program in 2005 but transferred to the undergraduate creative writing program after the first semester of his freshman year. He lived in an apartment of poets and artists, known as the Gates Platform, in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn. It was there he founded and co-organized a semimonthly open reading series, the Gates Salon, which for over three years became an important venue for emerging young poets and writers in New York City. Out of the salon developed The Corresponding Society, a small press that published three issues of a literary journal titled Correspondence and that continues to release poetry and prose chapbooks.

In 2007 Lonely Christopher co-founded the Institutionalized Theater with poet and playwright Robert Snyderman. His first play, Retardo, was staged that year at the Bowery Poetry Club. His first chapbook, a collection of prose poems titled Satan, was published by Small Anchor Press in 2007. Gregory Afinogenov writes of Christopher's early work that he “has always treated the gap between text and reality as a subject for irony rather than despair. His earliest compositions relied on playful authorial dissociation from the subject matter, experimenting freely with rhetorical and narrative postures of various kinds.”