Adrian Blevins


Adrian Blevins is an American poet. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the 2016 Wilder Prize. Her other full-length poetry collections are Status Pending, Live from the Homesick Jamboree and The Brass Girl Brouhaha. With Karen McElmurray, Blevins co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia, a collection of essays of new and emerging Appalachian poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers. Her chapbooks are Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, which won the first of Bright Hill Press's chapbook contests..
Blevins won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award in 2002. Other prizes include the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction from the Chattahoochee Review, a Pushcart Prize for "Tally" from Appalachians Run Amok, and other magazine prizes from Ploughshares and Zone 3. She was a Walter Daken Poetry Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference in 2008 and a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2017.

Life

Adrian Blevins was born in Abingdon, Virginia to a family of artists, including her grandfather, her father, her stepfather, and her stepmother.
Blevins graduated with a BA from Virginia Intermont College, a MA in fiction from Hollins University, and a MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College in 2002.
She went on to teach at Roanoke College, Hollins University, Sweet Briar College, and at Lynchburg College as the Thornton Wilder Fellow. She currently teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine and lives in East Winthrop, Maine.
Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Baffler, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, The Greensboro Review, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. They have been reprinted in The Open Door One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of "Poetry" Magazine; Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else; From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great.

Awards

Poetry

;CollectionsThe Brass Girl Brouhaha, ISBN 978-1-931337-10-6Live from the Homesick Jamboree
  • Appalachians Run Amok Status Pending
;ChapbooksThe Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, ISBN 978-0-9646844-2-3Bloodline
;List of poems
TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collected
Tally2011
Dear New Mothers of America2009

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

Nonfiction

Critical studies and reviews of Blevins' work