B. 1973
Brian Blanchfield
Brian Blanchfield was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He earned his BA from the University of North Carolina and his MFA from Warren Wilson College. He is the author of the poetry collections Not Even Then (2004) and A Several World (2014), which received a James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the chapbook The History of Ideas 1973-2012. His collection of essays Onesheets (Nightboat Books, in progress) received a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Grant in 2013. A second book of prose Proxies: Essays Near Knowing is due from Nightboat in April 2016. Of Blanchfield’s poems, Maggie Nelson said, “They ask us to re-discover our language as we discover what and how his poems mean and sound. His poems have an earned reputation for their circuitous elegance and conceptual probing, by which he pays homage to the complexities of our language, our living, our landscape, and our loving.”
 
Blanchfield worked for the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux and has taught at various institutions, including the Pratt Institute, the Otis College of Art and Design, and the University of Montana, Missoula, where he was also the Richard Hugo Writer-in-Residence. Poetry editor of Fence, Blanchfield currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he teaches at the University of Arizona.