Brian Blanchfield is the author of three books of poetry and prose.  Most recent, Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (Nightboat Books & Picador UK) is a collection of two dozen essays, part cultural close reading, part dicey autobiography.  Widely reviewed and named Book of the Year by critics writing for BOMB, Publishers Weekly, The New Statesman, Tin House, The Portland Mercury, and other publications, the work received a 2016 Whiting Award in Nonfiction and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Gay Memoir.  For his first two books of poems—Not Even Then (University of California Press) and A Several World (Nightboat Books)—he was awarded a 2015 Howard Foundation Fellowship.  A Several World received the 2014 Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award for outstanding second book by a U.S. poet and was a top-ten finalist for The National Book Award.

His newest poetry has appeared in publications like Harper’s, The Yale Review, New England Review, A Public Space, Poem-a-Day, and in Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry. His newer essays—on what it is to be “left to one’s own devices” in the Trump era, on Guy Davenport and intellectual independence, on the last three AIDS novels of Hervé Guibert, on the legacy of Roland Barthes’s final works, and other subjects—have been published in Grand, Oxford American, Textual Practice, CounterText, Barthes Studies, Chicago Review, and Best American Essays 2022.  He is at work on two manuscripts.

Born the son of a truck driver and a secretary in Winston-Salem and raised Primitive Baptist up and down the Piedmont of North Carolina and Virginia, he lived—before moving west in 2006—in New York City for a decade, much of which he worked in book publishing, including at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  He was for years, through 2014, Lead Poetry Editor of Fence, and in 2015 he created and began hosting Speedway and Swan, a poetry radio show which aired for four years on KXCI Community Radio, in partnership with the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson.  He taught creative writing at one boarding school and eight universities—among them The Pratt Institute, Cal Arts, The Iowa Writers Workshop, Bennington College, and University of Idaho— before accepting a position at University of Montana, where since 2022 he has been Associate Professor of Poetry and Nonfiction Writing.  He lives in Missoula with his husband, John.

Shorter bio and other publicity images can be found here.