Prize-winning poet Laurel Blossom's latest book, a chapbook entitled Un-, has just been published (March, 2020) by Finishing Line Press.

Laurel’s second book-length narrative prose poem, Longevity, was published by Four Way Books in October 2015. You can find excerpts called "The Longevity of Bone" at Tupelo Quarterly 2, "The Invention of Loss" at Frigg Magazine #43, "Red Rewind" at Linnet's Wings Summer 2014, and "Now What" in Hotel Amerika #13.

Longevity is the second in a projected trilogy of long poems, the first of which was Degrees of Latitude, published by Four Way Books in 2007. Blossom's 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 magazines including Poetry, Pequod, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Harper's, the Southern Poetry Review and Ocean State Review. Online, some of her work appears at Per Contra and Taos journal of poetry and art, as well as at International Psychoanalysis, and earlier, Frigg Magazine, BigCityLit, Winning Writers, and Poets.com. A number of the poems published in these journals have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

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. While living in South Carolina, she edited an anthology of 20th century Edgefield poetry called Lovely Village of the Hills, available through the Tompkins Library, 104, Courthouse Square, Edgefield SC 29824.

In addition to poetry, Laurel has written essays and book reviews for such publications as Publishers Weekly, American Book Review, Small Press Review and Pleiades. 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, for more than 20 years 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 is on the Advisory Board of the Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation in Vero Beach, Florida. She lives in Los Angeles.