The Dillon Johnston Writers Reading Series Presents Dr. Christian Bök on March 24

Join us in Hanes Gallery on March 24, 2026 for “The Hardest Pursuit of All — the Making of the Xenotext,” a presentation and reading by Dr. Christian Bök. The talk will take place at 5pm and will be followed by a reception and book signing. This event is free and open to the public.

An early trailblazer of the interdisciplinary field known as BioArt and a founder of the Conceptual Poetry movement, Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia, a globally renowned bestseller, which won the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. After 25 years of effort, Bök recently completed his groundbreaking experiment, The Xenotext, combining literature with biology to engineer a deathless bacterium so that its DNA might become a durable archive that can store a poem about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Bök has exhibited his work at galleries around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, The Power Plant in Toronto, and the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Bök is a Fellow in both the Royal Society of Canada for his contributions to the humanities and the Royal Canadian Geographic Society for his contributions to the biosciences. Bök has also received a nomination for the prestigious Oxford Professorship of Poetry and for the Prix Littéraire Bernard Heidsieck, Centre Pompidou. He currently teaches Fine Art in the School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University in Leeds, United Kingdom.