Craig Blais was born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1978. After dropping out of high school, he was educated at Holyoke Community College and the University of San Francisco. He earned his MFA from Wichita State University in 2007 and his PhD from Florida State University in 2014. He has taught college-level composition, creative writing, and literature in Kansas; Seoul, South Korea; Florida; and Massachusetts, where he is currently Associate Professor of English at Anna Maria College. 

 

Craig's first collection of poems, About Crows (University of Wisconsin Press 2013), was a Walt Whitman Award and National Poetry Series finalist before being selected by Terrance Hayes for the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His second poetry collection, Moon News (University of Arkansas Press 2021), was named as a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins. His poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, the Southern Review, Western Humanities Review, and the Yale Review, among other places.

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Craig serves as chair of the Worcester County Poetry Association's College Contest, which awards the Elizabeth Bishop Manuscript Prize and the Etheridge Knight Performance Prize annually.