Veteran Poet Randy Blasing’s 10th Poetry Anthology Is Exhibited at the L.A. Times Festival of Books 2023

For the poets he taught, Randy Blasing is a writer whose skill needs no introduction.

Educated in Carleton College and then the University of Chicago, he is a well-decorated writing veteran whose works have appeared in anthologies like The Young American Poets and Poetry Daily Essentials as well as magazines such as the Paris Review and the Yale Review.

He has taught his craft in various institutions across the United States, such as William & Mary and the Community College of Rhode Island. The Ingram Merrill Foundation had even awarded him a fellowship in poetry.

To date he has published a total of 10 poetry collections, each one earning considerable praise from peers and readers. This year, the tenth book in his personal series, “True Story: Poems,” was exhibited at the prestigious Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which was held at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, last April 22-23, 2023.

“True Story: Poems” takes a more introspective and somewhat autobiographic theme with its poems. There are titles dedicated to memories of Blasing’s childhood in the Midwest alongside his views on faith growing up. The poetry concludes with an ambitious sequence of 25 sonnets that speak about his experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside that, he shares his views on other events, particularly the infamous riots and burning of Minneapolis during the lockdown.

Readers who did not get the chance to check out the book display of “True Story: Poems” by Randy Blasing at the festival should purchase a copy on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

“True Story: Poems”
Author | Randy Blasing
Published date | December 1, 2020
Publisher | Stillwater River Publications
Genre | Poetry

Author Bio
Born in Minneapolis and educated at Carleton College and the University of Chicago, Randy Blasing taught poetry and creative writing at colleges across the country, from California (Pomona College) to Virginia (William & Mary) and New England (Community College of Rhode Island), and has published ten widely praised books of poems—most recently, “True Story” (Copper Beech Press, 2020).

David St. John (of USC), for instance, greeted his eighth collection, “Sweet Crude” (Persea Books, 2013), with this endorsement: “The many loves that inhabit this book are like the poems themselves—luminous in their jeweled aspects and crafted to be enduring.”

His work has regularly appeared in magazines like Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review, and he was featured in such landmark anthologies as The Young American Poets (1968), The POETRY Anthology, 1912-2002, and Poetry Daily Essentials 2007.

He received a fellowship in poetry from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a Translation Fellowship as the co-translator (from the Turkish) of the first English versions of Nazim Hikmet’s poetry—his highly acclaimed Poems of Nazim Hikmet (Persea Books, 2002) and Human Landscapes from “My Country” (Persea Books, 2002).

Last summer he made his fiftieth trip to Turkey, and his new and selected poems, his eleventh poetry book, are due out this fall.

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