Chris Chable

Even though Christopher Alex Chable’ knew he’d been nominated to be UMSL’s poet laureate, he says it was still a total surprise when Steve Schreiner, the MFA in Creative Writing program director, called him with the good news.

Chable’ says that receiving the honor was validating of his hard work and made him feel loved. “It symbolized for me that there is a community that values me,” he says. “It was a very special feeling and a surprise.”

Chable’, who is from Columbia, MO, says that his love of the written word began in elementary school when he first read Brian Jacques’ Redwall series. Fantasy books like Redwall led to Edgar Allen Poe and reading Poe led, in middle school, to Chable’ first writing poetry for fun. Later on, during his undergraduate studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Chable’ became active in community theater, writing several plays and radio dramas. He studied romance languages and literature. After completing his bachelor’s he attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where we worked toward two Masters, one in Spanish Languages and Literature and another in Latin American Studies. His goal while at the University of Wisconsin was to become a professor. When he first started thinking about writing as a career it was in the context of scholarly, academic writing.

While working toward both these degrees, Chable’ began to get burned out on academic writing. He was writing for hours every day on academic topics, but he wanted creative writing to be a part this routine so he forced himself to write poetry at least an hour a day too.

“I’d get up in the morning and go to the library and read a book from the master’s list and take notes,” Chable says. “I’d do that for about six hours then take a lunch, after which I’d get back to it until evening. During all that it kept me sane to spend a little bit of time crafting a story or a poem.”

Eventually, creative writing became more than just a therapeutic hobby. Chable’ relished in being able to say what he wanted to say how he wanted to say it, free from constraints of scholarly writing. It was at this time he started to think about writing as craft. After completing both Master’s degrees, he came to UMSL for the MFA program in Creative Writing to hone his craft.

Chable says his poetry is interested in politics and people, in nature and forms. He mostly writes about other people, strangers and people he knows. He doesn’t write about himself much, but insists that a “mild mannered family man” like himself still has a “thing or two about him” others might find intriguing.