Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist and essayist and a co-editor, as well as the original founder, of Caveat Lector. His third collection of poems The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of “The Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His novels include Voyage to a Phantom City (“an enormous achievement,” award-winning translator Peter Bush), and Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Cafe (“puts one in mind of Ulysses as much as Naked Lunch,” award-winning poet Ernest Hilbert). .Two of his most recent books are the middle-grade stories, the first in the “Otherwise” series, – If You Ride A Crooked Trolley... and The Judgment Of Biestia, which won an Independent Press Award in Preteen Fiction in 2025 and was a finalist for the K. M. Anthru International Prize 2024. His debut novel, A Spy in the Ruins(“one of the best American novels since Thomas Pynchon and William Gass,” Miguel de Cervantes–award winning novelist Juan Goytisolo), was relaunched in October 2025 to celebrate its twentieth anniversary. His latest book, The Beauty of Matter: A Pagan’s Verses for a Mystic Idler, appeared at the end of 2025.

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