MY POETY PLACE: POEMS BY CHRIS RUSSELL

Chris Russell is a poet, writer, artist, musician, and paraprofessional.

His poems have been featured in Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Microfiction Fridays, and New Hampshire Public Radio, and in journals such as The Café Review, and Mouse Tales Press, and hundreds more poems can be read on his blog.

Beginning his college career at New Hampshire Technical Institute in 1996, following two years of working as a paraprofessional in an elementary school, he enrolled in an AA program, majoring in Substance Abuse Counseling.

Then in 1998, he transferred to Plymouth State University (then Plymouth State College), majoring in the much broader liberal arts field of English, while working in a bookstore. He earned his BA at Plymouth in 2001, was the recipient of a Book Prize in English, and was an Artist in Spotlight, upon graduation.

He spent the next two and a half years living in Plymouth, continuing to sell textbooks, while commuting to the Vermont College of Fine Arts (then Vermont College of Norwich University) low residency MFA in Writing program in Montpelier, where he would focus on exploring moves of human consciousness, enactment, apperception, and counterpoint in contemporary poetry. In 2004, he earned his MFA there.

The next few years he spent surviving a perfect storm of obstacles and misperceptions, keeping him from moving forward with his writing career, some of them created by his own aesthetics, value system, less than outgoing temperament, and lifestyle, and so, to be able to have time for writing and remain motivated enough to do so, he decided to move back to the city of his childhood, Concord, New Hampshire. It was there he returned to working as a paraprofessional, coming full circle, a familiar enough choice he knew would free up time enough for writing, while reliably and predictably meeting his basic needs.

For nearly two decades he has worked with children with IEP’s in public schools, 6 and a half hours a day, and this has allowed him to balance a writing life spent writing poems of self-discovery, with doing some noble and selfless work,

an ideal, that, though often a thankless and exceedingly disciplined kind of lifestyle upon second glance, has ironically helped him navigate the wounded healer’s path of self-transcendence toward what he’ll never find next, and generate a more inclusive, gentle, and unconditionally supportive mindset toward his own writing process, an emotionally mature quality he believes is reflected more in his poems now.

He currently lives and works in Concord, New Hampshire, where, when not writing, or helping case managers with their caseloads, he can be sighted walking to and from work, regardless of the weather, heard vocalizing sweet sounding nonsense verse from the ridgeline of an acoustic guitar, and evidenced making what look like sort of Zen doodles that paradoxically resemble human brains, onto a page ripped out of a random notebook. He can be reached via email at thekrustisin@gmail.com.