Personal Summary

Brian Blanchfield is the author of three books of poetry and prose—Not Even Then, A Several World, and Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, for which he received a 2016 Whiting Award in Nonfiction. The collection—part cultural close reading, part dicey autobiography—was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Memoir and was named the Book of the Year by critics writing for Publishers Weekly, Tin House, BOMB, The Portland Mercury, and The New Statesman. A Several World was a top-ten finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Poetry and winner of that year’s Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award. His other honors include a Howard Foundation Fellowship, a Willapa Bay Artist's Residency, and an Idaho Arts Council Fellowship.

His work has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2022 (ed. Alexander Chee), American Poets in the 21^st Century (eds. Michael Dowdy & Claudia Rankine), and Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, and has appeared in many magazines, including The Oxford American, Harper's, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, CounterText, Textual Practice, A Public Space, Brick, Conjunctions, Bookforum, New England Review, Chicago Review, The Yale Review, and The Brooklyn Rail.

Formerly lead poetry editor of Fence and founder/host of the poetry radio show Speedway and Swan on KXCI Tucson, he has taught creative writing at The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, The University of Idaho, Cal Arts, Otis College of Art and Design, University of Arizona, and Pratt Institute of Art, and is core faculty at The Bennington Writing Seminars. He and his husband, John, make their home in Missoula, where he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana.

Courses Taught

Poetry Workshops: Intermdiate, Advanced, and Graduate levels

Prosody and Poetry Techniques Studio

Nonfiction Workshops: Intermediate, Advanced, and Graduate levels

Nonfiction Techniques Studio

Queer Literature

Tradtions of the Essay

Life Writing

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Teaching Experience

To me, a creative writing classroom is like its counterpart in fine arts: a studio in which we learn by doing, familiarize ourselves firsthand with the properties of our medium, and honor in one another the experimentation that artistic development requires.  At more advanced levels, I enjoy helping student poets build from individual poems to series, chapbooks, and full collections.  My guiding objective in any workshop is that a writer should feel their next essay or poem is more possible, not less.  I teach several modes of nonfiction writing, but I celebrate that in its oldest and now in its very newest traditions the essay is a space for thinking rather than knowing, that even narrative nonfiction—be it lifewriting or other sorts of account—is most charged when it can operate as both story and study.