BLAUNER, Laurie (Ann) 1953-

PERSONAL:

Born May 4, 1953, in New York, NY; daughter of Richard Blauner and Renee Lewis-Bolton; married Sheldon Glassberg, November 23, 1983 (divorced, 1986); married David Dintenfass, August 13, 1989. Education: Sarah Lawrence College, B.A., 1974; University of Montana, M.F.A., 1980. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES:

Home—7549 27th Ave., Seattle, WA 98117.

CAREER:

Poet and novelist. City of Missoula, Missoula, MT, coordinator of social services, 1980s.

AWARDS, HONORS:

King County Arts Commission Award, 1995, for Children of Gravity, and 2002, for Somebody; Artist Trust Award, 2001; Seattle Arts Commission grant, 2002, for poetry; National Endowment for the Arts grant; Centrum Residency Award.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Other Lives, Owl Creek Press (Seattle, WA), 1984.

Self-Portrait in an Unwilling Landscape, Owl Creek Press (Seattle, WA), 1989.

Children of Gravity, Owl Creek Press (Seattle, WA), 1995.

Facing the Facts, Orchises Press (Washington, DC), 2002.

OTHER

Somebody (novel), Black Heron Press (Seattle, WA), 2002.

Contributor to periodicals, including Georgia Review, Nation, New Republic, and Poetry.

SIDELIGHTS:

A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Montana, Laurie Blauner is a poet and novelist with published poetry in numerous journals. Her work has been collected in such volumes as Other Lives, Self-Portrait in an Unwilling Landscape, and Children of Gravity. Her fourth collection, Facing the Facts, was recommended in Ploughshares by Madeline DeFrees, who highlighted a sequence of poems in the book that take Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as its subject. Other poems in the collection consider domestic life and relationships.

In her debut novel, Somebody, Blauner employs a nonlinear narrative structure to reflect the shifting existence of a mother and her two daughters, who are challenged to reinvent themselves through the course of the mother's numerous marriages. Tracing the family's moves from New York City to Montana to Seattle, the novel, according to Matt Briggs in Tablet, "offers itself up as a completely imagined and unsettling world." A mixed assessment of the novel by a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews noted that "lyrical language applied to so much unleavened gloom and perversity accomplishes only so much: it's not enough." However, an enthusiastic review by Cris Day in Willamette Week Online concluded that "what sets this novel above others in the field is Blauner's unique way of seeing the world."