David Blair grew up in Pittsburgh. He is the author of three books of poetry, Ascension Days, which was chosen by Thomas Lux for the Del Sol Poetry Prize, Arsonville, and Friends with Dogs. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Greensboro Review, Ploughshares, Slate Magazine, storySouth, and many other places as well, including the anthologies, The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Devouring the Green, and Zoland Poetry.
He has taught at the New England Institute of Art and in the M.FA. Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter, and he has a degree in philosophy from Fordham University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
“What gives weight and density to David Blair’s remarkable poems is their almost Hardyish sense of regret and loss. So many of his poems are little dramas of what wasn’t said when it should have been said, or of the way celebratory instincts get undermined by the pressure of day-to-day life. I admire the quick shifts in voicing, the way a whole social world becomes revealed in some small characteristic gesture, and how alert Blair is to other people. Very few poets ever achieve this kind of fellow feeling and write about it with such tact and intelligent sympathy.
— Tom Sleigh
