Diann Blakely (June 1, 1957 - August 5, 2014) was an American poet, essayist, editor, and critic. She taught at Belmont University, Harvard University, Vanderbilt University, the Watkins Arts Institute, and served as the first poet-in-residence at the Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, Tennessee. A Robert Frost Fellow at Bread Loaf, she was a Dakin Williams Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She won two Pushcart Prizes and has been anthologized in numerous volumes, including Best American Poetry 2003. Her first collection, Hurricane Walk, was listed among the year's ten best by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; her second book, Farewell, My Lovelies, was named a Choice of the Academy of American Poets' Book Society; and her third volume, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, won the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America as well as the 7th Annual Publication Prize from Elixir Press. She was poetry editor at Antioch Review and New World Writing. Her poetry collection Rain in Our Door: Duets with Robert Johnson is forthcoming from White Pine Press, and Each Fugitive Moment: Essays, Memoirs, and Elegies on Lynda Hull is forthcoming from MadHat Press.

Other poems by Diann Blakely in Verse Daily:
October 23, 2008:   "Bad Blood" "A woman stares, wild-eyed from the terror known only when death..."

Books by Diann Blakely:

Other poems on the web by Diann Blakely:
Ten poems
Two poems
Three poems
"Dead Shrimp Blues"
Two poems

*Diann Blakely's Website.

*Diann Blakely According to Wikipedia.

About Lost Addresses:

"Through all of Lost Addresses, Diann Blakely's immediate gift and penchant mark a harmony of lyrical ear and narrative mind in the precise intonation that became her signature. The reader who listens into her textures will hear the abundant felicity of her singular art. This book is proof against forgetting."
—Rodney Jones

"As if a Southern belle raised to perform femininity had been cursed with the world-weary sensibility of Charles Baudelaire: that is the chimeric voice of these glittering, decadent, elegiac poems. It is difficult to accept that such a voice has been stilled, but the new poems come to us as gifts from the 'black-winged angel.'"
—Julie Kane

"I return to these poems for their facility with form, their directness and their digressions, their playfulness and wit, their care for imagery, imagination, and tone, but what I appreciate and admire most of all is how beautifully strange they often are. This is what I have come to recognize as Diann's print, and what makes her poems uniquely and unforgettably hers."
—Blas Falconer

"Blakely's storytelling is complex, no-nonsense, and often full of pain. Her voice is an in-your-face voice, an almost performance-poetry voice, yet her poems are full of craft and gorgeousness."
—Denise Duhamel