Biography
Diann Blakely was born in Anniston, Alabama in 1957. Blakely graduated from the University of the South, where she received her B.A. in Fine Arts/Art History, and Vanderbilt, where she earned her M.A. (1980), before taking her M.F.A. at Vermont College (1989). She also attended New York University and was a Special Student at Harvard and Boston University, where she studied with Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Helen Vendler. From 1986-87, she held an appointment at Harvard as Heaney's teaching assistant and Junior Tutor. Blakely has also taught at Belmont University, Vanderbilt, and was the Poet-in-Residence at Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, Tennessee. She has been a Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Robert Frost Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. A poetry editor at Antioch Review since the late 1990's, she continues to contribute poetry reviews and arts journalism to Antioch, Chapter 16: Tennessee Humanities Online, Harvard Review, Nashville Scene/ Village Voice Media, and Swampland. Blakely currently lives with her husband, music journalist Stanley Booth, near Savannah, Georgia, and is at work on a book-length series of poetic duets with Robert Johnson titled Rain in Our Door.
In both 1994 and 1995, Blakely was awarded the Pushcart Prize, and, in 1999, she was the recipient of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for the year's best manuscript-in-progress.
Bibliography
Non-Fiction
Poetry
Sources and Links