A Celebration of Books,
Writers & LIterary Excellence

Save the Date


Gaithersburg
Book Festival

May 16, 2026

10am – 6pm

Bohrer Park


Christopher Kondrich

Featured Title: Tread Upon
Tread Upon

Tread Upon—by turns tender and furious, and wholly original—attempts to depict the various scales upon which climate change unfolds around us.

Bold, incisive, and wholly original, Christopher Kondrich’s Tread Upon explores the social, political, religious, and economic drivers behind the chronic devaluation of the living world. In this book-length sequence, in which each section unravels a word or phrase of the prefatory poem, Tread Upon sprawls from suburbia to the Southern Ocean, from the Cape Fear River to the phones in our hands. Kondrich juxtaposes the intimate with the epic, integrating climate research and reporting to dismantle narratives of anthropocentrism and our individual responsibility amid corporate misinformation. What is the price of our (in)actions and who must pay the cost? In this world where “even one blade is a place,” the sequence reveals that the violence done to the living world is violence done to ourselves.

About Christopher Kondrich

Christopher Kondrich is a poet and writer whose third book, “Tread Upon,” will be published by Copper Canyon Press in April 2026. He is also the author of “Valuing” (University of Georgia Press, 2019), which won the National Poetry Series and was selected by Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019. His poetry appear widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. He currently teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.

Facebook

Instagram: @christopherkondrich

X: @ChrisKondrich