Adrian Blevins’ The Brass Girl Brouhahawas published by Ausable Press in 2003 and won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Blevins is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Foundation Award for poetry, the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction, and a Bright Hill Press chapbook award for The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes (Bright Hill Press, 1995 and 1996). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Utne Reader, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Ontario Review, Poet Lore, The Drunken Boat, Salon.com, and many other magazines and journals. New work is forthcoming in Southern Cultures, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, and Rivendell. As regards teaching, she says:

Since good writing is about making wonder (rather than money and friends and fame), I try to create an environment in which students feel strong enough to accept the premise that good writing will somehow violate, breach, defy, and plunder. In other words, since we can’t think and say what’s already been thought and said—since we’ve got to think and say what can’t be thought and said—I think good writing classes should begin with the unleashing of the permission to be honest. In many ways, the journey isn’t as mystical as I’m making it sound, since a clear understanding of the concrete methods good writers use can build self-assurance, and self-assurance will do wonders for anyone saying what can’t be said. And while I know publication is every writer’s goal, I try to urge my students to have the added ambition of wanting to produce work that will live beyond just that initial success. I’ve seen sentences vibrate—I’ve felt them almost lift off the page and fly. It is my goal as a teacher to help students write these sentences, and in so doing enlarge first themselves and then the world.

BOOKS IN PROGRESS

What I'm Waiting For, a collection of poems

Of Madmen & Spies, a collection of personal essays

http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/adrian_blevins/index.shtml

Poems in Audio (From the Fishouse)

http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/1005/poem_175623.html

Poetry Magazine

http://www.versedaily.org/againstapril.shtml

Verse Daily

http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/blevins.html

The Drunken Boat

The Poetry Foundation

The Language Coming from the Next Room

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/feature.html?id=178017

In Praise of the Sentence (Poetry Foundation Essay)

http://poetryfoundation.org/dispatches/journals/2006.07.31.html

Poetry Foundation Debate On the Sentence