Bio | lornaknowlesblake

Lorna Knowles Blake was born in Havana, Cuba and spent her childhood in Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela and Puerto Rico before coming to the United States for college. Her collection of poems, Permanent Address, won the Richard Snyder Memorial Award from Ashland University Press. Her second collection, Green Hill, selected by Charles Martin, won the Able Muse Press 2017 Book Award Contest and will be forthcoming in spring of 2018.

Lorna has been the recipient of a residency from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has also been awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship and a Walter Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers Conference. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Barrow Street and on the advisory board of the WCAI Poetry Sundays program. She has taught creative writing and led poetry workshops at Sarah Lawrence College, the 92nd Street Y, the Walker Percy Writing Institute at Loyola University and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She currently teaches creative writing in Cape Cod and New Orleans. After spending 35 years living and working in New York City, she now divides her time between two beautiful coasts in New England and New Orleans,

where she lives with her husband and their beloved Portuguese Water Dogs.

Lorna writes:

“What I have always loved about writing poems is that requisite quality of sustained attention, ever more necessary and challenging in this world of instant connectivity, fractured news and relentless information, often imparted in 144 characters or less. When I fall down the rabbit hole of a poem, I feel like Alice—too big, too small, bewildered, enchanted, curious and crafty. Not only that, but time flies out the window as the poem creates its own chronology. The quotidian world trails in the wake of the poem’s demands and realities. There is something magical in this process and in losing oneself to it. Not that every poem comes forth with unbridled delight (many are vexed or fractious; all are demanding) but the very act of writing feels both essential and joyful.”