Brian Blanchfield
Brian Blanchfield was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1973, and raised in the central Piedmont. He earned a BA from the University of North Carolina and an MFA from Warren Wilson College.
Blanchfield is the author of A Several World (Nightboat Books, 2014), which received the 2014 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was longlisted for the National Book Award. He is also the author of Not Even Then (University of California Press, 2004) and Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (Nightboat Books, 2016), which was named Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and others.
Laughlin Award judge C. S. Giscombe wrote about Blanchfield’s winning book:
Robert Herrick wrote, “Here we are all, by day; by night we’re hurl’d / By dreams, each one into a several world.” Where Herrick’s several is implicitly separate, Brian Blanchfield’s book examines and contests commonality. That is, A Several World unsettles the world—all and several alike—by reading its associations and memberships and public languages with an unnerving exactingness. And, for all that, it’s a very finely-ranging travelogue, though not in the usual senses: “Consider the milieu durance,” Blanchfield invites as the book sets sail and then responds, in the next line, to his own invitation—“Way out there now.”
About A Several World, John Ashbery wrote, “The oneness of our physical and spiritual life has rarely been conveyed more accurately.”
Blanchfield is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Howard Foundation Fellowship. He was a poetry editor of Fence and the founder and host of Speedway and Swan Poetry Radio on KXCI in Tucson. He was the Guest Editor for Poem-a-Day in December 2020, teaches at the University of Idaho and in the Bennington Writing Seminars, and lives in Moscow, Idaho.
