Michael Blanchard
Michael Blanchard
Adjunct Instructor of English & Editor of SLANT
Irby 409
(501) 852-2064
Michael Blanchard joined the Department of English as an adjunct faculty member in the fall semester of 2018. In addition to his teaching duties, he serves as editor of SLANT, UCA’s international journal of contemporary poetry. A native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where he was an Echols Scholar and inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and where he twice won the University Union Fine Arts Award for Poetry. He also earned an M.A. degree from Indiana University and completed additional graduate study at the University of  North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has taught literature and creative writing at Troy University (where he served as editor of Epos, the University’s literary magazine and the predecessor to the Alabama Literary Review), and where he was presented the Ingalls Award for Excellence in Classroom Teaching), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and the University of Louisiana.
Recent publications include five books of poetry: Naming the Silence: New & Collected Poems (2017), which was nominated for the Patricia Goedicke Award for Poetry; And the Mountain Replied: 39 Poems (2019); Stones in the Path: New Poems (2020); The Pearl Diver’s Daughter & Other Poems (2023); and The Things of This World (2026), which an editor of Southern Literary Review described as “his most powerful collection to date,” one which gracefully blends the philosophical, the reflective, and the personal, all with a scholar’s eye for the telling detail and a poet’s ear for the music in language.”