Adrian Blevins


Adrian Blevins is an American poet. Author of three collections of poetry, her most recent is Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the 2016 Wilder Prize. Her other full-length poetry collections are Live from the Homesick Jamboree and The Brass Girl Brouhaha. With Karen McElmurray, Blevins recently 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

She is the granddaughter of Banner Blevins, who is known in outsider art circles for his sculpture garden in McCall's Gap, Virginia, and the daughter of Virginia Intermont College art professor and painter Tedd Blevins.
Her stepmother, Carole Blevins, is also a Virginia painter, and her stepfather, Jake Cress, is a Virginia cabinetmaker.
She 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 taught 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

;Collections
;List of poems
TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collected
Tally2011

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