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Debra Di Blasi is the recipient of many awards, including a James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Thorpe Menn Book Award, Diagram's Innovative Writing Award, and the Eyster Prize in Fiction. Her novel What the Body Requires was one of four finalists in the Heekin Foundation’s James Fellowship for the Novel-in-Progress. Her story, “Sparrows,” was nominated for a 2005 Pushcart Prize, and a mixed media fiction, “Machine Ghosts,” was a finalist in the 2005 Panliterary Awards. In 2006, she received Pushcart nominations for “A Bird Does Not Understand the Concept of Glass” and “Personal Effects,” also selected by Web del Sol as “Best of Web Fiction.”
Books include the novellas Drought & Say What You Like (New Directions), and a short story collection Prayers of an Accidental Nature, (Coffee House Press), praised by The New York Times Book Review for its "clear, resonant prose, laced with bittersweet humor." Regarding her newest fiction collection, The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions , (FC2 Books/University of Alabama Press, Pleiades editor Kevin Prufer writes, “Di Blasi has a mind unlike anyone else writing fiction today, and this is her finest work yet.” And from David Hamilton, longtime editor of The Iowa Review: “Agitated, angry, inventive, iconoclastic, both literally and figuratively graphic… Beware, reader, you're in for a sumptuous, hypertextual, hypercharged ride. Hyperion himself would smile."
Other writing includes short stories, poetry, essays, art reviews and articles published in a variety of national and regional publications, such as The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Midwest, First Intensity, Boulevard, New Art Examiner, New Letters, Chelsea, Sleepingfish and many others. Her fiction has been adapted to film, radio, theatre, and audio CD in the U.S. and abroad, and appears in the anthologies Wreckage of Reason: Xxperimental Women Writers in the 21st Century (Spuyten Duyvil), Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales (Wayne State University Press), and &Now / And Then (Notre Dame Review), among others. Collaborations with visual and audio artists have been featured museum installations, and her drawings, paintings and art installations exhibited in prominent galleries.
Screenwriting credits include Drought, for which she won the 1999 Cinovation Screenwriting Award, and The Walking Wounded, finalist in the 1996 Austin Screenwriters Competition. The short film, Drought, was directed by Lisa Moncure and went on to win a host of international and national awards including Best Drama and Best Director (Toronto, Canada), Best Medium Film (Lisbon, Portugal), Kodak Visions Award for Cinematography (Avignon, France), and Grand Prize and Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee. Drought was only one of six films selected for the Universe Elle section at the 2000 Cannes International Film Festival in France.
Debra is publisher at Jaded Ibis Press and president of Jaded Ibis Productions, a transmedia corporation™ producing BLEED video channel of interviews with innovative writers and artist, and The Jirí Chronicles, a mélange of nearly 500 individual works of prose, poetry, fictive audio interviews and music, videos, print, web and visual art. She is a former arts writer at The Pitch, SOMA, and The New Art Examiner, and taught experimental writing forms at Kansas City Art Institute. Debra frequently lectures on innovative literature.IMPORTANT SEMI-AMUSING NOTE: I have NEVER, NOT EVER taken a Scientology course, though a web search of my name indicates I have.
Debra Di Blasi was born Debra Pickens in Kirksville, Missouri, and was raised on a cattle farm in Unionville, Missouri.
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POST-MILLENNIUM WRITER CHIC #39:
ALWAYS HAVE YOUR PICTURE TAKEN
WITH A POLITICIAN
Crosscut Founder and Chair Debra Di Blasi with former Congresswoman Karen McCarthy who was instrumental in the development of a national film board.
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6. Nonfiction online
Gass Pain
A humorous and informative analysis of William H. Gass's novel, "The Tunnel".
Visual Art
Paintings & Drawings
Paintings and drawings from the series, "muons, gluons, pions & strings: Homage to edward Witten."
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