Meet Adrian
Adrian Blevins is an American poet and a professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where she directs the Creative Writing Program. She is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Status Pending (Four Way Books, 2023), Appalachians Run Amok, Live from the Homesick Jamboree and The Brass Girl Brouhaha, as well as Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, a co-edited collection of essays by new and emerging Appalachian writers. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including the Wilder Prize from Two Sylvias Press, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, among many others.
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Praise for Adrian's Work
What did Dickinson say? That she knew it was poetry if she felt as if the top of her head was taken off? If that’s the standard, then hell yes this is poetry, and this is poetry that has lopped off my whole head and jammed me back into where and who I’m from. Blevins has found the sweet spot, building narratives that riff, stories that sing in the voice of the most combustible, lowdown country song sung by a “punk rock of a country heart.” Her subjects are Appalachian girlhood, love, death, and motherhood, in which infants smell “like not-death—like the earliest of the early yield—like kale and collards, maybe.” She story-sings of places where the water is “fat with the pee foam of cattle,” where people “live up a sidewinder the sidewinding likes of which only the dead can drive,” where the speaker remembers herself as “a teenage fugitive in a teenage redneck’s redneck truck,” Frank O’Hara and Ferlinghetti in her purse, “not needlepoint,” “never Einstein.” Death, for Blevins, is blah, and “when I say blah I mean blah,” but this poetry, cascading forward via a zillion ampersands run amok and a hilarious, provocative grief, is blah’s badass antidote.
—Diane Seuss
Praise for APPALCHAINS RUN AMOK
(Wilder Prize, Two Sylvias Press, 2018)