Chris Price began her literary life as an editor for Reed Publishing and Century Hutchinson, then edited the literary journal Landfall for much of the 1990s. She was the coordinator of Writers and Readers Week for the New Zealand International Arts Festival from 1992-2004.

Price’s work is marked by its interest in music, the history of science, and personae. In 2002, her first book, Husk, won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry in the New Zealand Book Awards. Brief Lives (2006) a hybrid of prose poetry, fiction, anecdote, and essay that samples the lives of characters both real and imagined was shortlisted in the biography category of the 2007 New Zealand Book Awards. Since then she has published two further poetry collections: The Blind Singer (2009), and Beside Herself (2016), welcomed as ‘pitch-perfect…a rich collection full of pleasures and surprises’ (Landfall).

Price has also participated in some notable collaborations. In 2005 she was one of ten writers who collaborated with NZ physicists to produce the anthology Are Angels OK? The Parallel Universes of New Zealand Writers and Scientists (2006). In 2011 she worked with composer Jonathan Besser and artist Max Gimblett to create the limited edition letterpress book, the green bicycle. Price was also among a group of six NZ and German poets to witness and respond to the Transit of Venus, a project that culminated in a performance at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair and a bilingual book, Transit of Venus | Venustransit (2016). In 2019 she was one of the instigators of Mataora: Encounters Between Medicine and the Arts, a live event that brought together researchers and medical practitioners with writers, actors and musicians. She has held residencies at Auckland University and in Tasmania, France and Switzerland.

Since 2009 Chris has convened the poetry and creative non-fiction workshop of the MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, where in 2012 she took over the series editorship of Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems from Bill Manhire. With novelist Emily Perkins she co-edited (and contributed an essay to) The Fuse Box (2017), which gathers essays from the NZ writing community to shine fresh light on the creative process. She has also co-edited NZ issues of the US journal Poetry (February 2018) and the Austrian journal Lichtungen. She was the 2011 recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship.