Adrian Blevins

Adrian Blevins

Adrian Blevins (born 1964, Abingdon, Virginia, United States) is an American poet. Author of three collections of poetry, her most recent is Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the 2016 Wilder Prize (Two Sylvias Press, 2018). Her other full-length poetry collections are Live from the Homesick Jamboree (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) and The Brass Girl Brouhaha (Ausable Press, now Copper Canyon Press, 2003). With Karen McElmurray, Blevins recently co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia (Ohio University Press, 2015), a collection of essays of new and emerging Appalachian poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers. Her chapbooks are Bloodline (Hollyridge Press, 2012) and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, which won the first of Bright Hill Press's chapbook contests. (Bright Hill Press, 1996).
Blevins won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award in 2002. Other prizes include the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction from the Chattahoochee Review, a Pushcart Prize for "Tally" from Appalachians Run Amok, and other magazine prizes from Ploughshares and Zone 3. She was a Walter Daken Poetry Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference in 2008 and a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2017.