Prize-winning poet Laurel Blossom's most recent book is Degrees of Latitude, a book-length narrative prose poem exploring the geography of a woman's life (Four Way Books, 2007). Excerpts - in earlier versions - can be found in xconnect VI and at www.friggmangazine.com. Earlier books include Wednesday: New and Selected Poems, The Papers Said, What's Wrong, and Any Minute, a chapbook, which was nominated for the Elliston Prize. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Billy Collins, editor) and in national journals including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Pequod, The Paris Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Deadsnake Apotheosis, Many Mountains Moving, and Harper's, among others. Online, some of her work appears at www.BigCityLit.com, www.winningwriters.com, and www.poetz.com. A number of the poems published in these journals have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Laurel serves on the editorial board of Heliotrope: a journal of poetry.

Laurel is a lifelong swimmer and, when not actually immersed in some body of water, swimming, she likes to be immersed in reading about it. Thinking that others might feel the same way, she has collected stories, essays and poems into an anthology called Splash! Great Writing About Swimming. Since moving to South Carolina, she has edited an anthology of 20th century Edgefield poetry called Lovely Village of the Hills, available through Paperwhites, 102 Courthouse Square, Edgefield SC 29824, (803) 637-0600.

In addition to poetry, Laurel has written essays and book reviews for such publications as Publishers Weekly, American Book Review, and Small Press Review. Her interviews and essays on cultural and political topics, ranging from writers' colonies and amusement parks to art forgeries, libraries, and nuclear non-proliferation have appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine, Empire State Report, and things (UK), among others.

Laurel is Regent Emerita at Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, where she holds a lifetime Foundation Fellowship. She co-founded The Writers Community, the esteemed writing residency and workshop program of the YMCA National Writer's Voice. She edited a 20th anniversary anthology, Many Lights in Many Windows: Twenty Years of Great Fiction and Poetry from The Writers Community in 1997. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Ohio Arts Council.

Laurel serves on the Board of Trustees of the Musical Arts Association of the Cleveland Orchestra, the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation, Vero Beach, Florida, and Edgefield Regional Arts in South Carolina. She belongs to The Explorers Club in New York City. She lives in rural South Carolina.