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Richard Lowell Blevins was born in Wadsworth, Ohio, in 1950, on the first day of the Korean Conflict. He would be declared a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. He studied poetry and the imagination with [[Media:Robert Duncan]], and the literature of the American West with Edward Dorn, at Kent State University, where he earned a General Studies degree in 1973. He holds advanced degrees in English literature from The University of Oregon (MA, English literature, 1976) and The University of Pittsburgh(Ph.D., English literature, 1985), with a dissertation on the western novels of Will Henry. He is an Associate Professor of English at The University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where he has taught both literature and poetry writing since 1978, serving as its Chair of Humanities for nine years. He was a winner of a Chancellor’s Award, the university’s highest recognition for classroom teaching, in 1999. He previously taught at The University of Akron and Kent State. Rich Blevins is the author of four collections of poems (Captivity Narratives, MEB/Spuyten Duyvil, 2008, Castle Tubin, Press One, 2006, Fogbow Bridge: Selected Poems, 1972-1999, Pavement Saw Press, 2000, and Three Sleeps: A Historomance, Igneus Press, 1992), in addition to nine chapbooks (Barren County, Oasii, 1999, The Collected Later Poems of Philip Marlowe, Talisman, 1998, High Season, Oasii, 1995, Longplaying, Burnt Norton, 1994, Clarel’s Motel, Am Here, 1987, Letters from Kansas, Zelot, 1986, Taz Alago, Zelot/Tansy, 1984, Remembering the Future, Zelot, 1981, and Court of the Half King, Tansy, 1980). His first national publication was in Richard Grossinger’s Io. His poems have subsequently appeared in many magazines and journals, including Credences, Poetry Review (London), New Poetry (Sydney), American Letters & Commentary, Café Review, 5 AM, Talisman, House Organ, atelier, Unarmed, and The Redneck Review of Literature. Rich Blevins’ scholarly writing features a dozen articles (on Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, George Oppen, Penelope Fitzgerald, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Patchen, Paul Blackburn, Robert Kelly, among others) in encyclopedias (DLB, Encyclopedia of American Literature, Encyclopedia of World Literature, and The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia) and many essays and reviews in journals, especially Sagetrieb. He has delivered papers at professional conferences on Pound, Creeley, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Robert Graves, Edward Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, and Kenneth Rexroth. Blevins’ work as an editor includes the SUNY-Buffalo edition of George F. Butterick’s Complete Poems, 1989, with a Preface by Robert Creeley, and volumes 9 and 10 of Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, from Black Sparrow Press. He was the editor and co-publisher of Zelot Press, from 1980 to 1988. (Note Jean Somers article?) Among its 70 titles are books and chapbooks by Oppenheimer, Kenneth Irby, Donald Byrd, Fielding Dawson, A. Kingsley Weatherhead, and Douglas Woolf. Oppenheimer’s chapbook, The Uses of Adversity, was reprinted in a New Directions anthology. Rich Blevins’ literary archive is housed at Kent State. Some of his correspondence is in special collections at The University of Connecticut, UC-San Diego, and SUNY-Buffalo. Among his closest friends and associates have been George Butterick, Robert J. Bertholf, Kenneth Irby, Gerrit Lansing, Peter Kidd, Sherman Paul, James Lowell, Helen Adam, Steve Ellis, Judith Vollmer, Jed Hickson, and Bill Shields. His wife Martha J. Koehler is the author of Models of Reading (Bucknel UP, 2005), a critique of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel. They live in western Pennsylvania with their two daughters. His son is a musician in Pittsburgh.