Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is a New York Times best selling poet and historian. She is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Against Vanishing (2025), How to Love the Empty Air (2018), and The Year of No Mistakes (2013), which was named the Book of the Year for Poetry by the Writers’ League of Texas. Her first nonfiction book, Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, was named one of five Notable Books on Exploring Poetry by The Washington Post and U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote that it “leaves no doubt that the slam poetry scene has achieved legitimacy and taken its rightful place on the map of contemporary literature.” Her second nonfiction book, Dr Mütter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine (2014) spent three months on the New York Times bestseller list and was included on several “Best Books of the Year” lists, including those by Amazon, NPR’s Science Friday, Library Journal, School Library Journal, The Guardian, and The Onion’s AV Club, which called it “a nearly perfect piece of non-fiction.” She has been awarded fellowships and residencies by the National Endowment for the Arts, the University of Pennsylvania, the Amy Clampitt House, and Hedgebrook, among others. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Ernest Cline, and their two children.