Christopher Hager is a writer who explores the lives of ordinary Americans through their writing—diaries kept by slaves, letters written by the wives and children of Civil War soldiers, magazine stories by factory workers.

His first book, Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, won the 2014 Frederick Douglass Prize for the best book of the year on the subject of slavery. The research for his latest book, I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters, was supported by a Public Scholar award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Hager is the Hobart Professor of the Humanities at Trinity College and lives with his wife and two children in northwestern Connecticut.