Adrian Blevins Adrian Blevins, Director of the Creative Writing Program, is the author of Status Pending, just out from Four Way Books this fall. Other books are Appalachians Run Amok, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, and 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.

Education

• M.F.A., Poetry, Warren Wilson College, 2002.
• M.A., Fiction, Hollins University, 1990.
• B.A., English, Virginia Intermont College, 1986.

Areas of Expertise

• Writing Poems, Writing Essays, American Prose Style

• Contemporary American Poetry

• Teaching Creative Writing

• Southern Literature

Personal Information

https://www.adrianblevins.com/

Publications

Status Pending
Appalachians Run Amok
Life from the Homesick Jamboree
The Brass Girl Brouhaha

Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia

Praise for Status Pending
Sentences are the magic fabric of these marvelous odes and anti-odes. A prime Adrian Blevins sentence is both warpath and crossroad catapulting us from anxiety to ecstasy to lullaby on a bridge of ampersands. An Adrian Blevins sentence is a live wire, an electric lasso, a clairvoyant conveyer belt containing multitudes. Her poems curse, woo and storm ‘the sleazy codswallop of the muck’ of Memory. Every enlivening line has the cadence of a brilliant, stupefied heart. Status Pending is terrific.
 --Terrance Hayes

Status Pending is a magical book, casting abecedarian spells and jangly riffs that transform our deepest griefs and fears into raucous, bawdy song. Yet, despite their masterful propulsive linguistic playfulness, these are poems that reckon unflinchingly with the raw and unbearable emotions of profound loss. Shifting effortlessly from Appalachian elegy to apocalyptic cultural critique, from wry humor to simple sorrow, Blevins’s speaker has proven herself to be as wily and resilient as the nearly-mythic grey fox she loves.

--Kathleen Graber

Praise for Appalachians Run Amok

”What did Dickinson say? That she knew it was poetry if she felt as if the top of her head were 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,”—not necessarily in that order. 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,” but this poetry, cascading forward via a zillion ampersands run amok and a hilarious, provocative grief, is blah’s badass antidote.” —Diane Seuss

“Wildness of spirit seems to have evaporated from American poetry of late, thinned by the turpentine of earnestness and scolding. Or maybe it all just flowed downriver into the soulful ocean named Adrian Blevins. This book has all the speed, longing, sweetness, cruelty, and sorrow of time passing (as it most surely does) through the body, anybody’s body. The intelligence of the body doing the speaking here is both ferocious and generous, self-aware in the most forgiving ways—its power feeds off a deep humility in the face of the awesome daily facts. It moves me, it really does. It is also often funny as hell.” —David Rivard

”When you’re lucky enough to get your hands on a book of poems this alive, everything you say about it feels like an understatement. Yes, Appalachians Run Amok is utterly original, wild yet tight, feisty, vibrant, combustible. Yes, it’s bursting with keen-eyed tenderness and unshushable attitude. Yes, the poems’ startling emotional intelligence blends with myriad other intelligences (e.g. maternal, earthy, topical, humane, etc.) to create this voice, “all hot and giddy.” A proud daughter of Appalachia, Blevins gifts us with vivid glimpses of where she came of age. Reading her beautiful, linguistically limber, cascading descriptions is like shooting the rapids with an expert river rider at the helm.” —Amy Gerstler

”Adrian Blevins’ Appalachians Run Amok tells mountain secrets—not the ones you’d think. Comical, frank, worried but not worried about it, and always in trouble, they roar up out of the gorge in swimsuits they like, letter jackets, and a fast kind of poem that can hang onto anything, including babies small as “two empty toilet paper tubes you glue together into a bazooka to blow at the cosmos through.” This book is smart and wise and also lots of fun.” –Lisa Lewis