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Adrian Blevins
Assistant Professor of English [Creative Writing]

Department Links:       English, Creative Writing
Affiliated Department(s):   Creative Writing


Office: Miller Library 217
Phone: 207-859-5253
Fax: (Creative Writing )
Fax 2: 859-5252 (English )
Email: ablevins@colby.edu

Mailing Address:
5250 Mayflower Hill
Waterville, Maine 04901-8852

Office Hours:
T, TH and by appointment

Semester Schedule
Education

MFA, Poetry, Warren Wilson College, 2002.

MA, Fiction, Hollins University, 1990.

BA, English, Virginia Intermont College, 1986.
Areas of Expertise:
  • Writing Poems, Writing Stories, and Writing Essays
  • Contemporary American Poetry and Fiction
  • Teaching Creative Writing
  • The Comic Vision (in contemporary American poetry and fiction)
  • Southern Literature
    • Professional Information

    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.

    Other Courses Taught
    Course Course Title
    Your Place in Space: The Adventurous Writers’ Adventurous Workshop
    Southern Comic Novels
    The Art of the Personal Essay
    Search for Identity in Twentieth Century Fiction by Women
    Search for Identity in Twentieth Century Fiction by Men
    Current Research

    BOOKS IN PROGRESS

    What I'm Waiting For, a collection of poems

    Of Madmen & Spies, a collection of personal essays

    Publications

    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

    Books

    http://www.ausablepress.org/a_catalog.html

    The Brass Girl Brouhaha
    Sex is in here. Mortality too, with all the incremental wounds to self-love and dignity that sex and mortality entail. And motherhood, square root of all the rest, is here, so stripped of every piety it steams. And spooling through this gorgeous, brassy brouhaha, the freshest poetic line that America has produced in thirty years. . . . I don't know where she got it except from the gods and from plenty of god-inspired hard work, but Adrian Blevins' perfect gift for timing is magic on the page . . . . [She] has harnessed the vernacular sentence—the one great underused resource in our national repository—and put it through paces that make the language young again. Edgy, double-timing, favoring the feint and swerve, she plays the momentums of slang and syntax, run-on and compression for all they're worth. And in expert hands like these, they're worth nearly everything: these poems remind us how smart the language can be on our behalf. We've needed this book; it comes not a minute too soon. Blevins' spirited demotic is a thinking machine." —Linda Gregerson

    Brouhaha New Pages Review

    http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/archive/reviews/brassgirlbrouhaha.htm

    Review: "This is the American voice that I've been waiting for: robust, complex, passionate, sassy, crucified, and amused. Adrian Blevins tells some stories about women's lives that we haven't heard before, and tells them with a big, rich unrestrained stylistic vocabulary. Poetry lovers, this is the dirty, trash-talking, highly edified real thang. When you open this book, you should hear the ballistic explosion of a cork jumping out of a bottle, or the starter's gun, which signals that the wild race has begun." —Tony Hoagland