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 was Professor of English at Anna Maria College until the school's closure. He is currently a WRAP Lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

 

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 and was named a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. His poems have appeared in Arts & Letters, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, Western Humanities Review, and Yale Review, among other places. ​His recent work has been supported by a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.